An Experiment on Donations, Personal Stories, and Bad Luck

We conducted a fundraising experiment to study the effects (1) of compassion towards the beneficiary, and (2) of giving participants an opportunity to attribute small donations to luck. We find that enhancing the participants’ compassion by exposing them to a plea to help the beneficiary, increases donations, tilting the distribution of donations to the right. Giving participants an opportunity to attribute small donations to luck reduces donations and tilts the distribution of donations to the left. Our evidence suggests that the latter effect dominates.