Incentives and willingness to donate

Dataset for a paper published in Economics Letters Volume 224, March 2023, 111005. The daset also include the Stata dofile for this paper. This study compares five incentive schemes for charity donation decisions in South Africa. Similar findings were documented to those in the literature when looking at mean decisions. Participants tend to donate more where endowments are hypothetical and have a lower payout probability. On the other hand, donations are lower where endowments are earned. The earned endowment effect was simply generated by framing part of the survey questionnaire as a “paid task”, suggesting an innovative way of framing earnings in experiments without the onerous requirement of earning tasks. Finally, material gender differences by incentive scheme was noted, which might have an important implication for knowledge of gender differences in charitable giving. The monetary incentives provided to participants lie at the heart of controversies in experimental economics. In the literature, opinions differ about the required structure and importance of incentives.