On the Desiderata for Online Altruism

Abstract

Online donation platforms help equalize access to opportunity and funding in cases where inequalities exist. In the context of public school education in the United States, for instance, financial inequalities have been shown to be reflected in the educational system, since schools are primarily funded through local property taxes. In response, private charitable donation platforms such as DonorsChoose.org have emerged seeking to alleviate systemic inequalities. Yet, the question remains of how effective these platforms are in redressing existing funding inequalities across school districts. Our analysis of donation data from DonorsChoose shows that such platforms may in fact be ineffective in mitigating existing inequalities or may even exacerbate them. In this paper, we explore how online educational charities could direct more funding towards more impoverished schools without compromising their donors' freedom of choice with respect to donation targets. Seeking to answer this question, we draw on the line of work on choice architectures in behavioral economics and pose a novel research question on the impact of interface design on equity in socio-technical systems. Through controlled experiments, we demonstrate how simple interface design interventions - such as modifying default rankings or displaying additional information about schools - might lead to changes in donation distributions helping platforms direct more funding towards schools in need. Going beyond online educational charities, we hope that our work will bring attention to the role of interface design nudges in the social requirements of online altruism.