Assessment And Selection Of Donation Applications:An Experimental Research

The traditional theory of Economics builds up on the assump-tion of "Economic man", but charitable behaviors present a real challenge to the rationality of this assumption and the Economic Theory based on it. The problem of charity is a special area, which differs from either provision of public service by govern-ment or exchange of goods in the free market. Researchers includ-ing economists develops a series of theories to explain the motive of why people donate money earned by hard-work, experiment economics provide tools to verify these theories.This experiment research is intended to investigate the social preference of Chinese. Our experiment bases on the donation to six villages at Lancang Lahu Autonomous County, Yunnan Province. We recruited 133 undergraduate and graduate student from Shan-dong University to conduct an experiment, which aims to assess the donation application of villages and select three villages from six villages to donate. The whole experiment is divided into two steps, the first step composes 15 stages. In each stage, the experi-ment participants need to choose one village from two villages that they are more likely to donate. The second step the experiment participant decide how to allocate money between herself/himself and the three villages she/he chooses most. Two treatments are designed on whether the experiment participant are allowed to type her/his opinions. Two main findings stand out in our study. First, our findings suggest that the students in the experiment care about the contents of donation application, the donation amount of village is determined whether they like the village and the num-ber of selections in step one. Moreover, we present evidence that if the participant can state her/his viewpoint, her/his donation are significantly less than the participant who can not express opin-ions.