Is In-kind Kinder than Cash? The Impact of Money vs. Food Aid on Social Emotions and Aid Take-up
Samantha Kassirer, Ata Jami, & Maryam Kouchaki (Northwestern University)
GPI Working Paper No. 12-2024, winner of the Fellowship 2024 Paper Prize and forthcoming in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
There has been widespread endorsement from the academic and philanthropic communities on the new model of giving cash to those in need. Yet the recipient’s perspective has mostly been ignored. The present research explores how food-insecure individuals feel and respond when offered either monetary or food aid from a charity. Our results reveal that individuals are less likely to accept money than food aid from charity because receiving money feels relatively more shameful and relatively less socially positive. Since many experts endorse the relative effectiveness of monetary over in-kind aid, we hope this research encourages scholars and practitioners to examine strategies to remove the shame associated with the take-up of monetary aid from charity.
Other working papers
How important is the end of humanity? Lay people prioritize extinction prevention but not above all other societal issues. – Matthew Coleman (Northeastern University), Lucius Caviola (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford) et al.
Human extinction would mean the deaths of eight billion people and the end of humanity’s achievements, culture, and future potential. On several ethical views, extinction would be a terrible outcome. How do people think about human extinction? And how much do they prioritize preventing extinction over other societal issues? Across six empirical studies (N = 2,541; U.S. and China) we find that people consider extinction prevention a global priority and deserving of greatly increased societal resources. …
The evidentialist’s wager – William MacAskill, Aron Vallinder (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University) Caspar Österheld (Duke University), Carl Shulman (Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University), Johannes Treutlein (TU Berlin)
Suppose that an altruistic and morally motivated agent who is uncertain between evidential decision theory (EDT) and causal decision theory (CDT) finds herself in a situation in which the two theories give conflicting verdicts. We argue that even if she has significantly higher credence in CDT, she should nevertheless act …
Funding public projects: A case for the Nash product rule – Florian Brandl (Stanford University), Felix Brandt (Technische Universität München), Dominik Peters (University of Oxford), Christian Stricker (Technische Universität München) and Warut Suksompong (National University of Singapore)
We study a mechanism design problem where a community of agents wishes to fund public projects via voluntary monetary contributions by the community members. This serves as a model for public expenditure without an exogenously available budget, such as participatory budgeting or voluntary tax programs, as well as donor coordination when interpreting charities as public projects and donations as contributions. Our aim is to identify a mutually beneficial distribution of the individual contributions. …