Technology-augmented choice-making impacts many facets of business. The use of economic incentives under the ubiquitous mobile ecosystem for prosocial behavior has been shown to be particularly effective. We build on the previous work on this topic and study how mobile-based economic incentives and environments influence charitable giving behavior. In contrast to traditional fund-raising, we consider the use of mobile devices to generate giving in small denominations, which we term microgiving. In collaboration with a US-based mobile app provider, we incorporated a functionality that allowed users to contribute their in-app reward points to charity. To encourage donations, we used economic incentives in the form of monetary subsidies, i.e., rebates or matching grants, as well as digital nudges in the form of push notifications. We studied the effects of these factors on giving behavior across two large-scale field experiments. Focusing on the different aspects of smartphones that could differentially impact charitable giving behavior—namely the intensely private and personal nature of smartphones—we examined how the visibility of donation decisions affects giving behavior by toggling audience effects. Our results show that the effectiveness of incentives is contingent upon the magnitude of the incentive as well as the extent to which individual decisions are visible to others. To situate our results in relation to the traditional medium of charitable giving, we propose an analytical model that internalizes the subsidy rates and the audience effect. This study provides initial empirical evidence and an analytical model to advance technology-augmented charitable giving that can provide insights to organizations and service providers.

中文翻译：

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推动大兵瑞恩：经济激励和受众效应下的移动微捐赠

技术增强的决策影响着业务的许多方面。在无处不在的移动生态系统下，利用经济激励来促进亲社会行为已被证明特别有效。我们以之前有关该主题的工作为基础，研究基于移动的经济激励和环境如何影响慈善捐赠行为。与传统的筹款相比，我们考虑使用移动设备进行小面额捐赠，我们称之为小额捐赠。我们与一家美国移动应用提供商合作，整合了一项功能，允许用户将其应用内奖励积分捐赠给慈善机构。为了鼓励捐款，我们采用了货币补贴（即回扣或等额赠款）形式的经济激励措施，以及推送通知形式的数字推动。我们通过两次大规模现场实验研究了这些因素对给予行为的影响。我们着眼于智能手机可能对慈善捐赠行为产生不同影响的不同方面，即智能手机的高度私密性和个人性，我们研究了捐赠决策的可见性如何通过切换受众效应来影响捐赠行为。我们的结果表明，激励的有效性取决于激励的大小以及个人决策对其他人可见的程度。为了将我们的结果与传统的慈善捐赠媒介联系起来，我们提出了一个分析模型，将补贴率和受众效应内化。