Shared Social Responsibility: A Field Experiment in Pay-What-You-Want Pricing and Charitable Giving

Abstract

The Greater Good Zero-sum games (if I win, then you lose) offer an easily grasped heuristic for all sorts of social interactions, especially those that involve money. For instance, companies may offer to contribute some portion of their revenues to charitable causes as an inducement to customers, but it is generally assumed that these pass-throughs directly diminish the corporate bottom line. Gneezy et al. (p. 325 ; see the Perspective by DellaVigna ) have designed a framework that encourages both customers and companies to contribute toward social goods, and, in field tests, this design increased charitable contributions as well as corporate revenues.