Summary: <p>Waiting a month to ask for a gift decreases the likelihood of a donation by 30 percent. That’s according to research on positive reciprocity that looked at more than 18,000 donation solicitations by a university hospital system.</p> <p><a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.pnas.org/content/115/8/1766" target="_blank">“Field study of charitable giving reveals that reciprocity decays over time”</a> was published by <a href="https://users.nber.org/~kesslerj/">Judd Kesssler</a>, associate professor of <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://bepp.wharton.upenn.edu/profile/juddk/" target="_blank">business economics and public policy at The Wharton School</a> at the University of Pennsylvania. Co-authors were Amanda Chuan, now an <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="http://econ.msu.edu/faculty/chuan/index.php" target="_blank">assistant professor at Michigan State University</a>, and <a href="https://oid.wharton.upenn.edu/profile/kmilkman/">Katherine Milkman</a>, also of Wharton.</p> <p>In this episode of Fresh Research, Kessler talks about the details of the paper, which examined donation requests made by the hospital system via email to a set of former patients in the fourth months after their first hospital visit. An extra 30-day delay between the “provision of medical care and a donation solicitation” decreases the likelihood of a donation by 30 percent. They used donation solicitation data on adult outpatients who visited the hospital system between May 2013 and April 2015.</p> <p>“Donation rates decline as the time separating a patient’s hospital visit and solicitation increases,” according to the study. “It shows that the percentage of patients who donate decreases considerably (from almost 1.5 percent to 0.4 percent) as the time delay separating the visit from a solicitation increases. This decline over time holds for both the first and last presolicitation hospital visits.”</p> <div class="wp-block-image"></div>
