Journal Publication
Defaults and Donations: Evidence from a Field Experiment
Published: December 2019
This paper uses a field experiment to study the effects of default settings on an online charitable giving platform. This experiment provided users with varying default values of donations to organizations and of “co-donations” to the platform. The paper finds that defaults affected individual donations values but not aggregate donation levels, although co-donations increased in the default co-donation rate.
Abstract and Citation
Steffan Altmann, Armin Falk, Paul Heidhues, Rajshri Jayaraman, and Marrit Teirlinck. 2019. Review of Economics and Statistics 101 (5): 808–826.