Altruistic Giving Behaviors And Motives: An Experimental Study

Individual altruistic giving behavior,as a spontaneously altruistic behavior without any material incentive,is an important tool for China to build a third distribution system and achieve common prosperity.Altruistic giving behaviors in real life include giving to others,volunteering,and charitable givings.In order to better understand people’s altruistic giving behavior and motives in various environments,this study explores altruistic giving behaviors and distributional preference motives in environments with various price of giving,karmic thinking in risk environments,and coordinating behavior and motives in coordinative giving environments.First,individuals’altruistic giving behavior is often influenced by the price of giving.This paper begins by varying the price of giving in a controlled laboratory setting to verify whether individuals’altruistic giving behavior is affected by the price of giving.If any,this study shows whether these influences are aligns with the predictions of models based on distributional preferences（selfishness and efficiency-equality tradeoff）.Additionally,this study seeks to determine the extent to which people’s distributional preferences serve as underlying determinants of their decision-making processes in a range of social games and can explain gender and cultural differences observed in various social games.This study uses data from a large-scale laboratory experiment involving a sample of 2,118 participants from Singapore and 1,260 participants from Beijing.Participants complete five distributional decisions with various price of giving and four other social games.The results indicate that participants’altruistic giving behaviors are significantly affected by the prices and their behavioral patterns strongly or weakly captured by models with several typical distributional preferences.This study estimates two key parameters of distributional preferences,₄)（propensity for selfishness）and7)9)₄)（efficiency-equality tradeoff）,in a constant elasticity of substitution utility function based on five distributional decisions.The results demonstrate that these parameters hold a remarkable degree of predictive power when it comes to explaining behaviors observed in various social games.Participants with higher levels of selfishness(₄))consistently exhibit a tendency to give less in these games.Conversely,the effects of the efficiency-equality tradeoff（7）9)₄))exhibit either positive or negative effect,depending on both the subject’s level of selfishness(₄))and a threshold that varied in response to the price of giving in the game.Furthermore,this paper also finds the power of distributional preferences in explaining gender differences and country differences in social games.This study provides valuable contributions to the understanding of human behaviors,especially in environment with various price of giving.Second,people may engage in a kind of karma motivated altruistic behavior,which means that they have karmic thinking and believe that their altruistic giving behavior will affect their benefits in an uncertain environment in the future.This paper designs a laboratory experiment involving real donations in a controlled environment to effectively exclude the influence of social interaction.This paper explores the impact of altruistic giving on participants’beliefs regarding their likelihood of obtaining high-value outcomes in their private lotteries.Results indicate that donations to a real charitable project,regardless of the existence of intention,significantly increase feelings of luck,offsetting negative effects of income decreases.Further investigation shows that altruistic behavior,instead of intention,is the main reason for karmic thinking.Participants who report higher convictions in karmic relationships show stronger biased beliefs and donate more than those non-believers,providing direct evidence for karmic motives in altruistic giving.Furthermore,our results suggest that participants’willingness-to-accept values are less sensitive to changes in income or donations.This study provides experimental evidence supporting karmic thinking in non-religious individuals,offering a possible explanation for understanding people’s motives for altruistic giving in risky environments.Thirdly,people often collectively make altruistic behaviors,where people’s altruistic giving is interacted with others’giving.This paper focuses on the real donation behavior of decision makers in two common collective altruistic environments,the one where the altruistic decisions of all donors are simply summed up to donate to a needy student（summation environment）,and the one where donors’altruistic giving need to be coordinated before donating to a needy student（coordination environment）.Using the strategy method,this paper collects the altruistic giving of the first-mover as well as the giving strategy of the second-mover.Results show that,although the amount of voluntary giving in the two forms is similar,the altruistic output（the money to beneficiary）in the coordination environment is significantly lower than that in the summation environment.Compared with the follower’s strategy in the Minimum Effort Game,this paper finds that follower’s low willingness to follow may be the main reason for the coordination failure and efficiency loss in the coordination environment.The paper further analyzes four approaches aimed at increasing the efficiency of altruistic output in coordination environment.It is found that seed money and matching funding crowd out voluntary giving in the summation environment.They are also ineffective in the coordination environment because of coordination failures.Two other cost-free policy tools,emphasizing the loss caused by coordination failure,and self-selection of environments,can improve charitable output and voluntary giving through changing follower’s strategy.This article provides experimental evidence for altruistic behavior and motives in a coordination environment and possible mechanisms that facilitate charitable giving in it.