Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/55594 
Year of Publication: 
2007
Series/Report no.: 
Working Papers No. 07-13
Publisher: 
Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Boston, MA
Abstract: 
In this paper, we propose a decision framework where people are individually asked to either actively consent to or dissent from some pro-social behavior. We hypothesize that confronting individuals with the choice of whether to engage in a specific pro-social behavior contributes to the formation of issue-specific altruistic preferences, while simultaneously involving a commitment. The hypothesis is tested in a large-scale field experiment on blood donations. We find that this active-decision” intervention substantially increases the actual donation behavior of people who had not fully formed preferences beforehand.
JEL: 
C93
D64
I18
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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