Altruism and Institutions: Theoretical, Econometric and Experimental Studies

在过去的十年里，实验经济学最重要的贡献之一是使经济理论家和政策制定者更加意识到利他主义，公平和信任。对大多数经济学家来说，现在似乎很清楚，个人利他主义是真实的，对于理解我们周围的经济世界的许多部分都很重要。本计画将从三个不同的方向来研究利他主义：理论、计量政策分析、实验室实验。 该理论模型将建立在数十年来对慈善捐赠者的研究基础上，并将其与慈善机构战略选择的新模型相结合。 目的是研究非营利市场使用的见解，从博弈论的发展，以研究营利性市场。 特别是，慈善机构共同筹资做法背后的战略机制是什么？该模型捕捉到了一个程式化的事实，即新的慈善机构往往是由不成比例的大捐助者，或政府或基金会赠款“播种”的。 该模型表明，这些早期的大额捐赠可以为较小的捐赠者提供信息和信心，这反过来又使慈善机构站稳脚跟。该模型说明了基金会赠款和政府拨款机构在播种新的私人非营利组织，不可能有一个成功的开始没有这些种子赠款的重要性。 第二部分使用非营利艺术和社会服务组织的纳税申报数据来研究政府赠款对捐赠和筹款的实际影响。我们希望证实理论部分的假设，并展示非营利企业的行为反应如何抑制或放大政府赠款的影响。我们预计，我们的研究结果将对政策制定者和筹资者产生重要影响。 最后一节概述了一系列的实验研究项目。这些受控实验室研究将审查非正式社会机构和正式“筹资”机构的各个方面。 其目的是了解如何通过简单的制度设计来捕捉和鼓励个人在公平、利他和合作方面的自然利益。 我们希望发现人们的互动结构与自然利他主义可以表达的数量之间的一些基本关系。 我们的最终目标是表明简单的补救措施，而不是复杂的机制，可以对利用个人利他主义的力量产生重大影响。

One of the most significant contributions of experimental economics over the past decade is bringing a greater awareness of the altruism, fairness, and trust to economic theorists and policy makers. It now seems clear to most economists that individual altruism is both real and important for understanding many parts of the economic world around us. This project will study altruism from three different directions: Theory, econometric policy analysis, and laboratory experiments. The theoretical model will build on decades of research on givers to charity by combining that with new models of the strategic choices of charitable institutions. The objective is to study non-profit markets using the insights from game theory that were developed to study for-profit markets. In particular, what are the strategic mechanisms behind the common fund-raising practices of charities? The model captures the stylized fact that new charities tend to be "seeded'" by disproportionately large donors, or by government or foundations grants. The model shows that these large early donations can provide information and confidence to smaller donors, and this in turn allows the charity to gain a firm footing. The model illustrates the importance of foundation grants and government granting agencies in seeding new private non-profits that could not have had a successful start without the these seed grants. The second section uses tax-return data from non-profit arts and social service organizations to look at the actual effect of government grants on giving and fund-raising. We hope to confirm they hypotheses of the theoretical section, and to show how behavioral responses by non-profit firms can either dampen or magnify the impact of government grants. Our results will, we expect, have important consequences for both policy makers and fund-raisers. The final section outlines a series of experimental research projects. These controlled laboratory studies will examine various aspects of informal social institutions and formal "fund-raising" institutions. The objective is to see how individuals' natural interests in being fair, altruistic and cooperative can be captured and encouraged by simple institutional designs. We hope to discover some basic relationships between how people's interactions are structured and the amount of natural altruism that can be expressed. Our ultimate goal is to show that simple remedies, rather than complicated mechanisms, can have a big impact on harnessing the power of individual altruism.