Does competition affect giving?

Charities often devise fund-raising strategies that exploit natural human competitiveness in combination with the desire for public recognition. We explore whether institutions promoting competition can affect altruistic giving – even when possibilities for public acclaim are minimal. In a controlled laboratory experiment based on a sequential “dictator game” , we find that subjects tend to give more when placed in a generosity tournament, and tend to give less when placed in an earnings tournament – even if there is no award whatsoever for winning the tournament. Further we find that subjects’ experimental behavior correlates with their responses to a post-experiment questionnaire, particularly questions addressing altruistic and rivalrous behavior. Based on this evidence, we argue that behavior in our experiment is driven, in part, by innate competitive motives.