We compare two fixed-prize mechanisms for funding public goods, an all-pay auction and a lottery, where public good provision can only occur if the participants’ contributions equal or exceed the fixed-prize value. We show that the provisional nature of the fixed-prize means that efficiency and endowment conditions must both be satisfied to assure positive public good provision. Our main findin...

Fact: Holding force constant, a snowball thrown from 10 feet away will hurt more than one thrown from 50 feet away; it will have more impact. We show that people expect charitable donations-much like snowballs-to have more impact on nearby (vs. faraway) targets. Therefore, because making an impact is a powerful motivator of prosocial behavior, people are more willing to take action to help near...

* Although legacy income is of enormous importance to many of the UK’s fundraising charities, little reliable information exists to assist practitioners in targeting potential legatorswith appropriatemessages. In particular, themotives formakinga legacy gift and the differences between those doing so and the general supporter base are unknown. This makes segmentation and the subsequent developm...

I examine the impact that lotteries introduced to support education have on overall funding for education. Using donor-level survey data and nonprofit tax returns, I find that donations to education-related organizations fall with the introduction of a lottery. This result seems to be driven by donors’ response to the new (highly publicized) government revenue source (rather than a decrease in ...

Many articles have examined the psychological drivers of charitable giving, but little is known about how people mentally budget for charitable gifts. The present research aims to address this gap by investigating how perceptions of donations as exceptional (uncommon and infrequent) rather than ordinary (common and frequent) expenses might affect budgeting for and giving to charity. We provide ...

Pacific people in New Zealand are a minority ethnic population identified in national prevalence studies as having the highest risk of developing gambling problems. As earlier studies identified some links between culture and gambling for this population, our study aimed to deepen understanding of these links and their role in explaining the disproportionate gambling harms experienced by Pacifi...

objective: to determine the prediction value of disorder of consciousness scale (docs) for consciousness recovery after traumatic brain injury (tbi) leading to coma. methods: this is a descriptive-cross-sectional study of the correlation between the level of patients’ consciousness in the first and second weeks and the first 2 months after traumatic brain injury, using docs scale. results: the ...

This paper follows directly from our forthcoming paper in International Journal of Machine Consciousness, where we discuss the requirements for an artefact to be a moral agent and conclude that the artefactual question is ultimately a red herring. As we did in the earlier paper, we take moral agency to be that condition in which an agent can, appropriately, be held responsible for her actions a...

Movements in animals arise through concerted action of neurons and skeletal muscle. General anaesthetics prevent movement and cause loss of consciousness by blocking neural function. Anaesthetics of the amino amide-class are thought to act by blockade of voltage-gated sodium channels. In fish, the commonly used anaesthetic tricaine methanesulphonate, also known as 3-aminobenzoic acid ethyl este...