When efficient help is perceived as greed: experimental evidence

We study charitable behaviour when genuine donations can be misinterpreted as being greedy. This is relevant when private benefits from donating, like tax exemptions, bring into question whether donors are truly altruistically motivated. In our experiment, a potential donor, the distributor, decides how to split a sum of money between themselves, a paired non-distributor, and a charity of their choice. Choosing to donate part of the sum to charity is socially efficient because the charity receives four times the amount, with the difference covered by the experimenters. Our conditions vary in the choice set available to the distributor and whether the choice set becomes known to the non-distributor. With the choice set unknown, the distributor may be concerned that the non-distributor will believe the money has been split unfairly, with the distributor keeping a larger share. Overall, we find this not to be the case: the number of individuals who donate to charity is not significantly lower when donating could be perceived as greedy.