Decomposing desert and tangibility effects in a charitable giving experiment
通过慈善捐赠实验，分解了实验室中两种常见的人为因素：电脑屏幕上承诺的货币（实验货币单位）的无形性，以及随机“意外之财”与劳动所得的不同处理，发现前者对总捐赠额影响更大，后者对捐赠概率影响更大。
Abstract Several papers have documented that when subjects play with standard laboratory “endowments” they make less self-interested choices than when they use money they have either earned through a laboratory task or brought from outside the lab. In the context of a charitable giving experiment we decompose this into two common artifacts of the laboratory: the intangibility of money (or experimental currency units) promised on a computer screen relative to cash in hand, and the distinct treatment of random “windfall” gains relative to earned money. While both effects are found to be significant in non-parametric tests, the former effect, which has been neglected in previous studies, has a stronger impact on total donations, while the latter effect has a greater impact on the probability of donating. These results have clear implications for experimental design, and also suggest that the availability of more abstract payment methods may increase other-regarding behavior in the field.