Do Preferences for Charitable Giving Help Auctioneers?
Svetlana Pevnitskaya (spevnitskaya@fsu.edu), R. Mark Isaac and Timothy C. Salmon Abstract: Preferences for charitable giving in auctions can be modeled by assuming that bidders receive additional utility proportional to the revenue raised by an auctioneer. The theory of bidding in the presence of such preferences results in a very counterintuitive prediction which is that in many cases, bidders having preferences for charitable giving does not lead to a substantial revenue advantage for an auctioneer. We test this theory and this prediction with a series of experiments. In one experiment we induce charitable preferences exactly as specified in the model to see if bidders respond to them as predicted. We find that they do. We then conduct a second experiment in which the revenue from the auctions is donated to actual charities to verify the robustness of the prediction when charitable preferences are generated by a more natural source and find again that the theoretical prediction holds
