CFR Research Seminar with Katherine White (University of British Columbia)
The Center for Retailing at the Stockholm School of Economics is pleased to invite interested academics and practitioners to a Research Seminar on:
“The Closing the Gap Effect: Joint Evaluation Leads Donors to Help Charities Further from Their Goal”
This seminar is part of the Center for Retailing's Visiting Researcher Program, generously funded by the Hakon Swenson Stiftelsen.
Registration
Please register for the seminar here (in person or via Zoom)
General questions
E-mail: alexander.mafael@hhs.se
Organizers:
Alexander Mafael
Aylin Cakanlar
Wiley Wakeman
About the speaker
Prof. Kate White is Professor of Marketing and Behavioural Science at the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia. She is also Senior Associate Dean, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Sustainability at the UBC Sauder School. Kate’s research focuses on how social contexts, identities, and emotions shape how consumers make ethical, prosocial, and sustainable choices.
Kate is the author of “The Elusive Green Consumer” in Harvard Business Review and she has published over 50 research articles. Kate was honored as one of the top 5 Marketing Researchers in the world by the American Marketing Association and has been inducted to the College of Arts and Sciences, Royal Society of Canada. She was awarded a Canada Clean 50 Award for thought leadership in sustainability and the American Marketing Association’s Award for Responsible Research in Marketing.
Kate currently serves as Associate Editor for the Journal of Marketing Research and the Journal of Consumer Psychology and she is on the editorial review boards of the Journal of Consumer Research and the Journal of Marketing.
About the seminar
Charitable donations can be influenced by the relative distance of a cause from its fundraising goal. This work demonstrates how concurrently considering more than one charitable cause along with goal progress information shifts consumers’ donation decisions. When charitable causes are evaluated jointly (vs. separately), the comparison makes relative need for help more salient and easier to evaluate, leading to greater giving to the cause farther from its goal.
A multi-method investigation, involving six pre-registered experimental studies, seven supplemental studies, and a large secondary dataset with over 10,000 projects from a micro-crowdfunding platform, provides evidence for this effect and demonstrates that it is robust to variations in the type of cause, number of projects, and the donor being able to personally complete the goal.
Conversely, this effect is eliminated or reversed when charities are evaluated separately (as relative need for help is less salient), when the gap between charities is smaller (as perceptions of need for help are diminished), or when a for-profit business is evaluated (as the context does not heighten sensitivity to need). This work contributes to research on goal progress and evaluation modes and has implications for charitable giving in comparative contexts like crowdfunding.
Previous visitors
Stefano Puntoni (The University of Pennsylvania)
Joyce Liu (City, University of London)
Hannes Datta (University of Tilburg)
Remi Trudel (Boston University)
The Center for Retailing Visiting Researcher Program (CFR VRP) aims to attract world-leading researchers to Sweden to disseminate, communicate and produce (retail) knowledge at the frontier.