Self-Signaling and Prosocial Behavior: a Cause Marketing Mobile Field Experiment / Jean-Pierre Dubé, Xueming Luo, Zheng Fang.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dubé, Jean-Pierre H.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Luo, Xueming.

Fang, Zheng.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w21475.

NBER working paper series no. w21475

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Self-Signaling and Prosocial Behavior

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2015.

Summary:

We empirically test an information economics based theory of social preferences in which ego utility and self-signaling can potentially crowd out the effect of consumption utility on choices. Two large-scale, randomized controlled field experiments involving a consumer good and charitable donations are conducted using a subject pool of actual consumers. We find that bundling relatively large charitable donations with a consumer good can generate non-monotonic regions of demand. Consumers also self-report significantly lower ratings of "feeling good about themselves" when a large donation is bundled with a large price discount for the good. The combined evidence supports the self-signaling theory whereby price discounts crowd out a consumer's self-inference of altruism from buying a good bundled with a charitable donation. Alternative theories of motivation crowding are unable to fit the non-monotonic moments in the data. A structural model of self-signaling is fit to the data to quantify the economic magnitude of ego utility and its role in driving consumer decisions.

Notes:

Print version record

August 2015.