Independent vs. Coordinated Fundraising: Understanding the Role of Information

We use “real donation” laboratory experiments to compare independent fundraising, where donation requests from different charities arrive sequentially to potential donors, with coordinated fundraising, where donation requests from different charities arrive simultaneously. We find that coordinated fundraising generates significantly larger total donations compared to independent fundraising. We show that the order of requests affects the level of donations only in independent fundraising; in particular, participants donate larger amounts to charities whose requests arrive earlier. We then test whether these differences might be explained by the informational asymmetry between these two fundraising mechanisms by varying the information received by the subjects.