Rewarding Altruism? A Natural Field Experiment

We are extremely thankful to the CEO, Board members, and staff of the Northern Ohio Blood Service Region of the American Red Cross, and, in particular, to Brent Bertram and Barbara Thiel for their invaluable assistance and collaboration. We thank the participants at the Advances with Field Experiments workshops in Philadelphia and Chicago, the ASHE conference in Ithaca, the ASSA meetings in Denver, the Midwest Health Economics Conference in Ann Arbor, the 7th annual SITE workshop in Experimental Economics, the Southern Ontario Behavioral Decision Research Conference in Toronto, the Workshop on Natural Experiments and Controlled Field Studies in Munich, and at seminars at Case Western Reserve University, EIEF, Johns Hopkins University, Melbourne University, Monash University, Queensland University of Technology, the University of Michigan, the University of New South Wales, the University of Queensland, UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara, the University of Toronto, and Yale University for their comments. We benefited from conversations with Christian Catalini, Ray Fisman, Alberto Galasso, Uri Gneezy, Sacha Kapoor, Steve Leider, Liz Lyons, Costas Meghir, Philip Oreopoulos, Devin Pope, Joseph Price, Heather Royer and Justin Sydnor. Soujanya Bulagannawar, Tina Chen, Il Myoung Hwang, Sebastian Maass, Dominic Smith, Sarah Stith and Andrew Zhang provided outstanding research assistance. Financial support from the National Science Foundation (Grants #0851587 and #0851602) is gratefully acknowledged. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.