We warmly invite you to a research seminar featuring Dr Matej Lorko. The seminar will take place on Wednesday, 7 May at 5:00 p.m. in Room A409 of the Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw building.
You can find the speaker’s profile here: https://lorko.sk/bio/.
Please see below for the title and abstract of the presentation.
Title: Coordination on altruistic market with imperfect substitutes
Abstract: Charitable gifts and volunteering deliver enormous value in areas where neither the government, nor the commercial sector is sufficiently active. However, altruistic markets often develop severe inefficiencies due to miscoordination of volunteers. In this paper, we focus on two coordination failures which result in wasted volunteering labor and resources, and/or losses in recipient welfare, namely (1) oversupply of a single altruistic good and (2) ineffective allocation of volunteers across multiple altruistic goods. We conduct a laboratory experiment, in which participants in a group of four are independently deciding whether to provide a costly help to a charity or not. The baseline condition involves a single (high-priority) altruistic good with a restricted demand. While all those how decide to help incur a cost, only one unit of help generates a benefit for the recipient. In other conditions, we add a second (low-priority) altruistic good with unrestricted demand but lower recipient benefit. All conditions involve a within-subject treatment manipulation – we introduce a coordination device which informs those who decided to provide a high-priority good of whether the demand for this good was already met or not. We find that the coordination device significantly improves the efficiency of the altruistic market in all conditions. Specifically, in the baseline condition, the device decreases the supply of high-priority good (and thus eliminates its oversupply), while in the other conditions, the device increases the supply of high-priority good (and thus eliminates its undersupply) by effectively reallocating volunteers across the two goods.
We look forward to seeing you there!