题目：Individual Fundraising in Online Charity Giving

报告人：梁屹天，清华大学经济管理学院市场营销系助理教授

报告时间：5月29日（周三）15:00-16:30

地点：中欧平台武东路校区114

报告摘要：Charity has been part of human culture dating back to 2500 BCE. In modern times, people donate to charity increasingly through online platforms. Limited research attention has been paid to this, and extant literature also neglects a prominent component of online charitable giving: online individual fundraising. While studies of offline charity have shown that solicitation under peer pressure leads to higher donation, it is unclear whether this phenomenon holds for online individual fundraising given several significant differences between offline and online settings. In this paper, we examine whether online individual fundraising donors give more and what factors moderate such an effect. We found that in general this is true: An individual fundraising donor gives on average ￥6 more than an organic donor. However, this effect is overturned for anonymous donors, where the organic donors actually give more than those in individual fundraising. In addition, the effect varies along the life cycle of a project or individual fundraising, with the early and later donors showing greater effect than those coming in the middle of the life cycle. Finally, we conduct counterfactual analysis to examine how individual fundraising affects organic donation through information sharing. Counterintuitively, we found that blocking organic donors’ access to individual fundraising will increase organic donations for most projects, with the aggregated gain across projects in our sample to be 4.2%.