Chapter 1 Charitable Giving

This Chapter summarizes the overall facts about charitable giving. Charitable giving has remained an active and important area within Public Economics. Then also discusses about the four main approaches one could take to research on charitable giving. The first approach is to look at giving as a simple individual economic decision, where a quantity of gifts to supply is determined by maximizing a utility function subject to a budget constraint. The second approach is to think of giving as a strategic interaction, with many actors involved. The third and potentially very fruitful approach based on giving as a social exchange. The request may come from a friend, a co-worker, a door-to-door solicitor, a phone call from a fund drive, an on-air campaign from public broadcasting, a television commercial with an emotional appeal, or even from a news report during a time of a disaster. Finally, the fourth and newest approach: giving as a response to conscious, or perhaps even unconscious, empathic, moral, or cultural urges.