1
CONTROVERSIAL QUESTIONS AS AN INSTRUMENT
TO ENHANCE CHARITABLE GIVING
Alejandro Manuel Miranda Salas
11375388
15/01/2018
Supervisor: Giorgia Romagnoli
Thesis submitted as a requirement for the degree of Master
of Science in Economics:
Behavioural Economics and Game
2 Statement of Originality
This document is written by Student Alejandro Manuel Miranda Salas who declares to take full responsibility for the contents of this document.
I declare that the text and the work presented in this document are original and that no sources other than those mentioned in the text and its references have been used in creating it.
The Faculty of Economics and Business is responsible solely for the supervision of completion of the work, not for the contents.
3 AKNOLEDGEMENTS
This project would not have been possible without the support and efforts of “Wishing Spiral” and “Afanoc”. I am very thankful for having had the chance to work with this team of professionals that have always tried to put this project forward.
Many thanks to my supervisor and adviser, Giorgia Romagnoli, for being supportive, positive and flexible as well as for having read my drafts and proposals.
And finally, thanks to my parents for their life-long support, for encouraging me to pursue any goal and for helping me keep my feet on the ground whenever it was necessary.
SUMMARY
In this Master’s Thesis I propose an experiment on altruistic giving. Specifically I propose to modify standard charity boxes by introducing a new design that combines the actions of giving to a charity and of voting in real time.
The so-called “Survey Boxes” include a controversial question and 2 cubicles. The cubicles and the question aim to create the illusion of a real-time survey, allowing the user to vote and donate at the same time by placing their coins in one of the 2 cubicles. Each cubicle is transparent and displays the coins collected, allowing a public opinion poll to be generated.
Although the results of this study are inconclusive because of the lack of statistical significance, they go in support of the idea that questions and controversy can serve as an instrument to influence altruistic behavior, without changing the economic incentives or restricting the freedom of choice of people.
4 TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION...6
1.1 Motivation ...6
1.2 Background...9
1.3 Summary of the results...10
CHAPTER 2: INCORPORATING BEHAVIORAL INSIGHTS AND EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE INTO CHARITABLE GIVING...12
2.1 Introduction ...12
2.2 Heuristics and Biases ...15
2.3 Time inconsistent choice……….……….. .21
2.4 Social and Private Norms………...……….24
2.5 Conclusion………..………31 CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY ...32 3.1 Participants...32 3.2 Timeline ...33 3.3 Treatments ...33 3.4 Questions ...35 3.5 Limitations………..38 3.6 Hypothesis………..……...39 CHAPTER 4: RESULTS...40
4.1 Survey Box treatment VS Traditional Box treatment………40
4.2 Controversial Questions VS Non-Controversial Questions………..41
4.3 By type of question………..42
5
5.1 Summary of the results...45
5.2 Limitations...45
5.3 Conclusion………..48
5.4 Steps for future research………..………..49
REFERENCES ...51
6 Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 Motivation
Not so long ago, popular reality-show contests broadcasted worldwide, attempted to engage their public, and probably increase their profits, asking their audience to vote what participants would be eliminated from the contest. For doing so, they used to establish a SMS based system in which their audience would pay a certain price in order to submit their vote.
Interestingly, thousands of followers were willing to pay a price to contribute with their opinion to the poll. Assuming that such a great number of people are not making decision-making mistakes, it is reasonable to think that individuals willing to pay this price receive a reward, in terms of satisfaction, from voting for their candidates, and that this reward is bigger than the potential satisfaction that they would earn from using the costs of voting for something else, if, ceteris paribus, everything else in the life of the individual remained constant.
Many of these television contests rapidly adopted new and more engaging methods such as confronting candidates in polls with only two options to choose from, with only one participant passing to the next round. Perhaps, one of the reasons for the adoption of this method is that offering audiences polls with binary choices was more profitable for these contests than making one general poll and ask the audience to vote for their preferred participant.
The willingness of people to take sides and to undergo costs in terms of effort or money in order to contribute with their vote to one option or another is especially relevant for Politics. For instance, when countries want to let their citizens directly decide upon relevant topics, they can use Referendums. Referendums use binary choice, giving citizens a sense of direct say in the outcome. Some nations have used them to decide upon topics such as potential changes in their Constitution or the membership of the country to a certain socioeconomic cluster of nations.
7 It seems that referendums are a reliable way to draw individuals to the ballot box and can be even more attractive for citizens than other type of voting, like for example, general elections, especially if the direct question raised is controversial enough. In the United Kingdom, for instance, the turnout in general elections has declined over the past 40 years. In 1974, general elections’ turnout peaked in United Kingdom with a 79% of participation and dipped to 59% in 2001. Over the past 15 years, turnout in general election has increased and, in 2017, it reached 68%. But turnout in referendums in Britain seems to follow a different trend.
In 1975, British citizens were asked to vote in a referendum whether Britain should remain in the European Community. Voter turnout was almost 65%. However, when British politicians, in 2011, enquired their citizens about the voting method that they preferred for choosing their Prime Minister, only 42% percent of the citizens with the right to vote did so. In 2014, Scottish citizens voted a referendum on independence, turnout was 85%, the highest participation rate for any vote in Britain since universal suffrage was introduced in 1928. In 2016, a second European membership referendum was held and the national turnout was 72%.
Turnout in Referendums in Britain seems to be unaffected by the low turnout trend of general elections. Instead, it seems that citizens are more prone to vote when they are asked to vote in Referendums with very controversial questions, highly covered by the media, such as leaving the European Community.
In 2017, Catalan politicians celebrated an illegal referendum that asked their citizens whether they wanted to become an independent state. The results and participation did not transcend and the illegal referendum was declared null. The Catalan government was dissolved and the nation’s government called for elections in the Catalan region.
The 7 political parties taking part in this election clearly defined their positions with respect to the “Catalan independence” and the parliament was polarized in two blocks. The issue received worldwide media coverage. These regional elections
8 attracted a record turnout of 79%, higher than any regional elections held in Catalonia until 2017.
This increase in participation can be seen as a triumph of democracy because it is generally believed that a higher number of voters legitimize the result of a vote. However, it raises some questions about the desirability of holding parliamentary elections when the main driver of individuals for voting seems to be to address one unique issue such as the independence of Catalonia. Moreover it may lead some citizens to cast their vote for a representative or a party that is not their preferred option but that does share the same opinion about the question that underlies the election.
Another point to consider is the desirability of media coverage of polarization. A recent study carried out by Matthew Levendusky and Neil Malhotra points out that media coverage of political polarization increases people’s beliefs that the electorate is polarized. Moreover, they affirm that the results of their study imply that “media’s depiction of a polarized electorate causes voters to moderate their own issue positions, but increases the dislike of the opposing party”.
The Catalan independence issue seems to be particularly touching, not only among the citizens of Catalonia but also among the rest of inhabitants of Spain. As a result of political polarization and the media coverage depicting a fragmented society, millions of citizens that few years ago cohabited in harmony, have witnessed an increasing number of unproportioned, sometimes even violent, acts from both sides.
Although political polarization and media coverage have been quite effective in attracting people’s attention, yet little research so far has consider its consequences. If by depicting a controversial issue as a binary choice problem politicians and journalist can draw more attention from the citizens, it is reasonable to consider other real life settings in which this effect might also play a role.
9 1.2 Background
Assuming that the environment can encourage individuals to take sides in plenty of issues regarding politics, culture or sciences, it might be interesting, to study the effect that raising controversial questions may have on attracting individual’s attention in a variety of other real life settings.
In 2016, Hubbub, an NGO that creates environmental campaigns hoping to inspire people to make healthier and more sustainable choices, released their prototype of the Ballot Bin. The Ballot Bin is essentially an ashtray meant to be placed in urban areas to tackle the issue of cigarette littering. It consists of a big box that includes 2 transparent cubicles and features a changeable sign that can have questions written on it. The cubicles attempt to resemble a real-time survey in which people cast their votes by simply dropping their cigarette butt into one of the two cubicles.
Hubbub maintains that independent evaluations of the effectivity of the Ballot Bin show that it has helped reduce cigarette littering by up to a 46% in certain areas. The creators point out that by using funny, provocative and controversial questions they can influence people to avoid dropping their cigarettes on the floor, preventing polluted environments.
Hubbub admits that “the question ‘Who is the best football player in the world, Ronaldo or Messi?’ hit a particular passion point”. Images of the ballot bin featuring this question spread throughout social media and reached millions of people everywhere.
Using the ballot bin to decrease cigarette littering is a measure that does not restrict people’s options or change their economic incentives such as a fine for polluting the environment would. The ballot bin uses choice architecture to alter people’s behavior in a way that it is better for the society and for the individual herself.
Hubbub’s idea has had an enormous influence on this thesis and has encouraged me to build my experiment
10 In my experiment, I use the apparently appealing nature of controversial questions to try to increase altruistic behavior towards the charity “Afanoc”, a Catalan NGO that tries to improve the life of children with cancer.
For doing so, I have changed the design of traditional charity boxes by including a question and 2 cubicles. The cubicles and the question aim to create the illusion of a real-time survey, allowing the user to vote by choosing one of the two options. Each cubicle is transparent and displays the coins collected, allowing a public opinion poll to be generated.
In collaboration with the NGO Afanoc and “Wishing Spiral”, a consulting agency that gives advice to NGOs, 30 charity boxes placed in small businesses in the metropolitan area of Barcelona were replaced by the non-traditional design (hereafter “Survey Box”), which included controversial and non-controversial questions. During a 4 weeks period, I tracked the money raised by the Survey Boxes and compared it with Traditional Boxes placed in the same small business.
With this experiment, I attempted to study the effect that using Survey Boxes may have and find out whether by offering people to vote about controversial topics that are highly covered by the media and make their vote count by displaying the money collected by each of the two options, Survey Boxes can collect, on average, more money than Traditional Boxes placed in the same small businesses during a 4 weeks experiment.
1.3 Summary of the results
5 participants had to be dropped out of the study because they did not comply with the experimental design. Out of the 25 remaining small business participating, 15 raised more funds for charity when they held a Survey Box than when they held a Traditional Box. On average, clients of small businesses contributed 1.81 times more to Survey Boxes than to Traditional Boxes. The mean difference was not statistically significant.
11 2 controversial and 3 non-controversial questions were included in the study. On average, controversial questions raised 2.21 times more funds than non-controversial questions. The mean difference was, again, not statistically significant.
One question asked individuals whether they think it is desirable to use animals in events or festivities. This question was particularly appealing among citizens and raised about 3 times more money than any of the other 4 questions, which included 1 controversial and 3 non-controversial questions. Statistical tests yielded a significant mean difference between this question and the rest of questions used in other Survey-Boxes.
Although the majority of the results reported are statistically insignificant, the majority of Survey Boxes raised more money than Traditional Boxes placed in the same shops. Moreover, the fact that one of the controversial questions raised as much as about 3 times more than any other question suggests that some controversial questions may be very touching and especially useful for the purpose of increasing people’s attention and donations.
12 Chapter 2. INCORPORATING BEHAVIORAL INSIGHTS AND EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE
INTO CHARITABLE GIVING 2.1. Introduction
Have you ever wondered how much generous and altruistic humans are? Or whether we are more altruistic today than 60 years ago? According to Charity Navigator, charitable contributions have increased all around the world during the past 40 years. According to the World Bank, the efforts of Governments, Non-profit Organizations and several other institutions have contributed reduce the world’s population living in extreme poverty, that is, on less than 1.90$, from a 35% registered in 1990 to a 10.7% registered in 2013.
The core of this success has been the labor of millions of volunteers and the charitable donations of individuals, which in 2015 accounted for 72% of all the donations received by NGOs and other non-profit institutions. NGOs have not only driven the vast majority of the humanitarian projects but also contributed to a large extent to change people´s attitude towards disadvantaged people and have spread concerns for equality, labor conditions and access to primary resources throughout the population. Modern NGO’s are organized, professional and global and have taken advantage of the new technologies that enable instant and global payments. According to the National Philanthropic trust, philanthropy and charitable giving have thrived in the digital era increasing charitable contributions year after year.
But, are there any reasons other than the ease that instant payments and the new forms of interaction that internet has enabled and brought to our lives that have contributed to increase charitable donations?
In this section I review how charities and governments have benefited from the contribution of scholars and public institutions to the field of Behavioral Economics, pointing out some of the behavioral insights that charities and governments have transformed into techniques to increase both, the number of donors and their funding.
13
2.1.1 Social Sciences and Decision-making
During the past 60 years, Economists, Psychologists, Political Scientists and Neuroscientists have joint forces to contribute with their research to the field of Behavioral Economics. The common goal of scholars investigating this field has been to expand our knowledge of decision-making and to try to come up with models with more predictive power than those built solely under the assumptions of perfect rationality attributed to Traditional Economics. In fact, Behavioral models do forecast better than those based on the Rational Choice Theory created under the assumptions of perfect rationality. However, this increased consistency in the predictions comes at a cost; Behavioral models are much more context dependent and therefore their applicability to real world decision-making problems is sometimes limited.
Nevertheless, despite of the contextual component of Behavioral theories, Firms, Policymakers and individuals have put insights derived from Behavioral studies at use in a very wide range of business models and policies.
2.1.2 The role of Behavioral Economists, NGOs and Governments
Behavioral Economists, Governments and NGOs have joint forces in search of ways to influence people to behave in a more pro-social or environmentally sustainable manner. From their cooperation we have obtained experimental evidence of situations in which Behavioral Theories can help the society by making people’s decisions more beneficial for all of us.
In 2008, Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein published their book “Nudge” in which they claim that government and public institutions, using our knowledge about decision processes, can present a decision making problem in such a way that it is more likely for individuals to choose actions that are better for them, the rest of the society, or both.
The concept presented in “Nudge” became very popular and reached all types of audiences. In fact, the book influenced British politicians to create the world’s first government institution dedicated to the application of behavioral sciences, the Behavioral Insights Team (BIT), unofficially known as the “Nudge Unit”, which attempts
14 to make public services easier and more cost-effective, improving the outcomes of the application of a policy by introducing behavioral models into politics and ultimately enabling people to make better choices for themselves.
By applying a large list of Behavioral Insights, the BIT has improved government policy and services in the UK by, for instance, increasing tax compliance, electoral participation rates and altruistic behavior.
2.1.3 Criticism to “Nudge” and the Behavioral Insights Team
In fact, the usage of nudges has been evaluated and highly criticized in the literature for being paternalistic, violating liberties or diminishing autonomy (Barton and Grüne-Yanoff, 2015 Bovens, 2009, Yeung 2012, Goodwin, 2012, Schubert, 2015) Some of these critics raise the question: How can we be sure that what policy makers think it is the best choice for the society is indeed the best choice if they can also, and often do, make mistakes?
One of the counterarguments that the literature offers to this claims is that presenting a decision-making problem in a neutral way is essentially not possible because humans are always affected by the way a problem is formulated, namely, the frame of a problem (Tversky, and Kahnerman, 1981). Then, if the previous statement is true, policymakers may be legitimated to try to find the best frame for the problem so that most people will make decisions in their own interest and the interests of society. The labor of the Behavioral Insights Team has also received criticism, especially from journalists. Despite of the number of successes in tax collection, organ donations or charitable giving, critics have pointed out that they have remained silent about other initiatives that they tried and did not work, raising concerns for transparency and the ethical implications of nudging citizens.
In my opinion, the labor of Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein and the BIT enables us to understand decision-making a little bit better. Furthermore it is important to note that policy makers have always used methods to change the behavior of people in a certain way not only by prohibiting certain behaviors but also by changing the incentives of people by using taxes and subsidies. Sometimes, governments have used
15 their tools such as mass media or education regulating the information available about an issue.
From my perspective the usage of nudges represents an opportunity to help people choose behaviors that benefit them and the society, avoiding regulation or changing the economic incentives of people, and creates a framework for the application of behavioral insights to real-world problems, allowing us to keep track of the progress and replicate the introduction of successful nudges in new territories with different Population’s characteristics.
The work of Richard Thaler, who was awarded in 2017 with the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for “incorporating psychologically realistic assumptions into analyses of economic decision-making”, together with the work of the BIT have made an enormous contribution to our understanding of altruistic behavior and its interaction with people’s Heuristics, Biases, Social Norms or Time inconsistent behavior. Their labor has inspired this Thesis and helped me build a theoretical framework for my experiment.
2.2 Heuristics and Biases
Many decisions in our life are based on our own assessment of the likelihood of uncertain events such as the outcome of an election. For instance, when purchasing a bottle of wine, individuals can be unaware of the taste of the product or the satisfaction that the wine may bring to their life. However, once an individual has made the decision of buying a bottle of wine, she is frequently presented with the opportunity to choose among a range of wines that have different prices and features. But how do individuals determine what the best wine for them is if there is uncertainty about the outcome of such choice?
The idea that “people rely on a limited number of heuristic principles by which they reduce the complex tasks of assessing likelihoods and predicting values to simpler judgmental operations” was proposed by Herbert Simon and first demonstrated by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahnerman in 1974.
16 Herbert Simon, one of the most prominent scholars in the area of heuristic research in judgement and decision making, coined, later in 1982, the term “bounded rationality”. He assumes that humans are unable to track process and consider all the available alternatives in a decision-making problem and therefore, they search for satisfactory solutions rather than perfectly rational ones.
In the example above, if the individual choosing knows little about the available choices of wine but cares about a limited budget, for instance 10 euros, a valid heuristic from her point of view could be: Buy the most expensive wine restricted to a budget limit of 10 euros. In this case, the decision-maker would be relying uniquely on the signals that prices can send her.
Let’s assume that Individual choosing wine has now some additional concerns about where it is produced. She believes that the best wines are produced in France, Italy and Spain and she is only willing to purchase wines produced there. The set of rules for her decision-making problem could now be: Buy the most expensive wine, produced in France, Italy or Spain, restricted to a budget limit of 10 euros. In this case, our decision-maker would be using the Representativeness heuristic first defined by Tversky and Kahneman (1974).
Using this heuristic, the decision-maker might be overestimating the likelihood of an Italian, Spanish or French wines being representative for the total of Italian, Spanish or French wines that are, according to her, better, on average, than the rest of wines. Indeed, the assumption that Italian, Spanish and French wines in the shop are better than the rest of wines may also be incorrect to a certain extent.
This decision maker might be falling into the Base rate fallacy (Bar-Hillel, 1980) when she assumes that just because these 3 countries have traditionally contributed more to the list of the best wines in the world than any other country, the probability of choosing a wine that is good is greater if she chooses a wine from these three countries. In the example, she ignores the fact that the production of wine of these 3 countries altogether accounted, in 2016, for approximately 50% of the production of wine worldwide making this countries more likely to have more wines in the top list of best wines as well as in the top list of worst wines.
17 If the decision-maker’s choice differs from the choice that she would have made with complete information and rational processing of all the available options, she would be deviating from the path of perfect rationality. Behavioral Economists have traditionally studied the relationship between heuristics and common deviations from the perfect rational choice. When individuals exhibit frequent and systematic deviations using heuristics when making a decision, behavioral economists define these departures as “cognitive biases”.
Even though Heuristics can lead to suboptimal choices, empirical work show that using them as a “rule of thumb” or a “mental shortcut” can be very efficient in terms of the outcome that they yield compared to the outcome that the optimal choice would yield if all the costs derived from finding the optimal solution were considered. (Gigerenzer et al., 1999).
Using “nudges” often imply making use of our knowledge of heuristics and biases to design frames for decision-making problems attempting to influence individuals to take the best decision for them, the society or both.
2.1.1 The default Bias
Samuelson and Zeckhauser (1988) were the first to demonstrate the existence of a tendency among people to stick to the current state of affairs, to make the choice for which no action has to be made. They named it Status Quo Bias and nowadays it is also known as Default Bias. Using this Heuristic, individuals try to avoid complex decision-making in order to save costs such as the cognitive effort that decision-making a new decision conveys.
For example one can think of an individual that goes to the supermarket and faces the decision-making problem of choosing breakfast cereal. Sometimes such choices become automatic and the individual appears to not consider any available option other that the option that she chooses on a regular basis. The Default option, in this case, is apparently good enough to avoid making a new one and going through a decision-making problem.
18 Kahneman, Thaler, and Knetsch (1998) produced experimental evidence of the Status quo Bias. The insight became very popular among Behavioral Scientists mainly because individuals tend to exhibit preference for the current state of affairs very often and in a wide variety of situations.
Some social scientists investigated the effect of default options as a way to influence altruistic or socially desirable behavior. In 2000, Madrian and Shea analyzed the power of the Default Bias in a real-life setting. New hired employees in a large U.S. corporation were automatically and immediately enrolled in the 401(k) saving plan unless they made a negative election to opt out of the plan.
With automatic enrollment as a default, employees were enrolled at a default contribution rate and the funds directed into a default allocation. An individual enrolled in this Plan would continue accumulating savings until she opted-out of the plan. The switch to Automatic enrollment increased significantly the rate of hired employees that participated in the 401 (k) plan. Participation rates for newly eligible workers increased from 49% to 86% with the introduction of automatic enrollment. Madrian and Shea point out that “participants hired under automatic enrollment exhibit what we call "default" behavior--sticking to both the default contribution rate and the default fund allocation even though very few employees hired before automatic enrollment picked this particular combination”
Richard Thaler and Shlomo Benartzi (2004) have also experimented with saving Plans and automatic enrollment. They present their own and name it “Save More Tomorrow” also known as “SMarT” .They claim that people enrolling in a Saving Plan tend to remain at the same saving rate that they started with, although in most cases a higher rate would be desirable for both, the individual and the society.
They argue that this behavior might be due to the tendency of people to postpone complicated decisions or actions, namely, to procrastinate. In SMarT they invite those who want to participate “to commit themselves, in advance, to a series of contribution increases timed to coincide with pay raises".
19 The introduction of SMarT was a success, most of those that opted to choose to participate in the plan stuck to it, and, in the trials for which there is data for four annual raises, SMarT participants almost quadrupled their saving rates.
The creators of the Plan argue that these results show the power that inertia has over certain choices that individuals perform on a daily basis, especially those that are concerned with ongoing commitments such as choosing a healthy lifestyle or remaining enrolled to a subscription or to certain services.
The tendency of individuals to stick to the current state of affairs and procrastinating complex decisions or actions will be visited under the scope of time preferences and time inconsistent behavior later in this Literature Review.
Eric Johnson and Dan Goldstein (2003) examine the role of choosing a no-action default for enrollment in the list of organ donors. By comparing countries with automatic enrollment with countries without it, they document”that “opt-in” or “Automatic enrollment” countries have much higher rates of enrollment, and a statistically significant higher rate of donations”.
In their book, “Nudge” Thaler and Sunstein raised controversy about the issue when they proposed to implement a mandated choice program that would make people say whether or not they would like to be an organ donor, every time that they renew their driving license. They propose to enlist individuals as organ donors in case they responded affirmatively to the question or failed to provide an answer to it.
This suggestion was vastly criticized for being “paternalistic” and even for violating liberties of people assuming that, by default, the state owns the rights to body parts of people who are dead or in certain hopeless conditions. (Rodrıguez-Arias and Morgan 2016). Thaler and Sunstain argue that changing the default to being a donor is not paternalistic but “libertarian Paternalistic” since it respects freedom of choice because it allows people to opt-out at any moment. The idea of Libertarian Paternalism was presented in 2003 by Thaler and Sunstain.
20
2.1.2 Default bias and charitable giving
The Behavioral Insights Team worked together with Home Retail Group to analyze the effect of default options combined with charitable giving. , Home Retail Group is one of the largest retail companies in the UK and, at the time of the experiment, had a payroll charitable giving scheme with 25% of their staff enrolled. The BIT studied the benefits of switching the default option to an automatic escalation scheme, which increased donations by 3% per year, giving workers the option to opt-out during the enrollment process and at any moment later on.
The proportion of new workers that ended up enrolled in the plan with automatic escalation when it was the default reached 49% while only a 6% chose automatic escalation when it was not the default option. The success of the experiment supports the BIT claim that “One of the best ways to encourage people to give is to make donating easy for them”.
2.1.3 The default Bias – Final remarks
The tendency of people to stick to the option for which no choice needs to be made, the Default Bias, has been widely reviewed and well documented. The experimental labor of Private and Public institutions and the influential suggestions of Behavioral Economists have demonstrated that policymakers can make use of the Default Bias to “Nudge” people to choose more socially desirable behaviors, without restricting their freedom to choose. This insight is influential for this Thesis because it provides evidence of the effect of choice architecture on the behavior of individuals and shows that very small changes in the way that problems are presented can make a big difference.
21 2.3 Time Inconsistent choice
When individuals are presented with decisions that require balancing cost now against potential future benefits or immediate benefits against possible future costs, they may engage in behavior that is regretted in the long run.
Outcomes of current actions in the future are uncertain because decision makers may not live enough to enjoy benefits from a certain action. For instance, eating healthy on a regular basis can be useless if individuals find themselves involved in a fatality.
Balancing the costs and benefits of actions in different points in time requires individuals to form time preferences, taking into account the importance of present and future outcomes.
Forming preferences about uncertain outcomes is complicated and requires a large amount of information, especially if these events will take place far in the future. Individuals rarely evaluate the potential outcome of every possible action; instead, they use heuristics to sort out the majority of the irrelevant choices, discarding them and focusing just on what they think is relevant.
When decisions are made at different points in time, departures from optimality, they are known as Time-inconsistent choices.
Stigler and Becker (1977) define Time-Inconsistent Choices as those “that would not have been made if they had been contemplated from a removed, dispassionate perspective"
In practice, most individuals make time-inconsistent choices every day. People often feel regret or guilt for having been unable to avoid engaging in a certain activity because it is, for instance, very enjoyable in the short term, despite being clearly counter-productive in the long run.
This suggests that the interplay between emotions and rational choice plays a major role when individuals make their time related choices.
22
2.3.1 Problems with the Standard Model of time preferences
The models used in Traditional economics describe an individual that obtains utility in from actions at different points in time and discounts the expected value of future outcomes to make decisions in the present. The Discounted Utility Model “assumes that total utility can be decomposed into a weighted sum – or weighted integral – of utility flows in each period of time “(Ramsey, 1928).
The first models assumed the discount rate to grow at a constant rate over time. Behavioral Economists challenged this assumption when they observed that individuals frequently ignore this rule. For example, empirical observed discount rates are not constant over time but appear to increase and decrease sometimes exponentially as different time horizons are considered (Uri Benzion, et. al. 1989, Chapman 1996, Pender 1996). This has been defined as hyperbolic discounting and it is today linked to for instance, the inability of individuals to exert self-control due to a desire for immediate gratification, suggesting that hyperbolic discounting often goes hand in hand with the ability of individuals to postpone rewards (Noor 2009).
Richard Thaler (1981) performed an experiment in which he asks participants to write down the minimum amount of money that they would require in [one month/one year/ten years] to make them indifferent to receiving $15 now. They show that participants use an average annual discount rate of 345% over a one-month period, 120% over a one-year horizon and 19% over a ten-year horizon, based in the median responses of participants [$20/$50/$100]. These findings support the idea that individuals show a particular tendency to value immediate gratification extremely more than delayed rewards.
2.3.2 Using time inconsistent preferences to improve the choices of individuals
Nowadays, it is assumed that the discount rate is not a constant but a function that can take different values over time and that can be influenced by contextual factors. However, independently of the time horizon that the individual finds herself considering, the discount rates can also influenced by other contextual factors.
23 If time preferences are context dependent, and respond to, for instance, to emotional factors, individuals can be influenced to take decisions that they would otherwise not take.
Thaler and Shefrin (1981) affirm that households might lack the self‐control to reduce current consumption in favor of future consumption, therefore, failing to save as much as the theory of Life Cycle Savings Rate predicts.
In order to help households to increase saving rates Richard Thaler and Shlomo Benartzi (2004) proposed to ask individuals to commit to increase their contribution towards a retirement saving plan and allocate a portion of their future salary increases to this purpose rather than to ask them to commit to increase contributions instantly after signing up for that.
Their plan, Save More Tomorrow™ (SMarT), performed extremely well, increasing the average savings rate of participants from 3.5 percent to 13.6 percent over the course of 40 months and demonstrating that behavioral insights such as the tendency to people to procrastinate complicated decisions and the preference of individuals for the default state of things can be used to design effective programs for time-related decisions.
The BIT (2013) has tried to apply the same idea to charitable giving. They worked with Zurich Community Trust22 (ZCT) to test the impact of encouraging people to sign up to annual increases in their giving rather than just one-off increases. Only 3% of the individuals invited accepted to take on automatic increases in their giving scheme accepted to participate, however, the expected contribution over time of those participants that signed up for automatic was 3 times as much as the expected contribution of donors that did not sign up for it.
This finding is especially valuable for Charities that aim to prevent inflation from eroding the lifetime value of donors.
24 2.4 Social and Private Norms
2.4.1 Does pro-social behavior of others influence our behavior?
The analysis of cooperation among non-related individuals has been, during the past 50 years, a central topic in Social Sciences.
Traditional Economics assumes a rational, selfish utility maximizer of payoffs, however, the degree of altruism and collaboration shown by participants in controlled lab and field behavioral experiments has provided evidence that people do not only care about their own monetary payoffs and those of their families and friends.
In fact, experimental evidence has shown that the degree of altruism observed among individuals that are genetically unrelated and that have no social ties can vary not only depending on the way a decision-making problem is framed but also depending on the behavior of other individuals that are taking part in the same activity.
For instance, in one-shot public good experiments, in which no group member can be excluded from the consumption of the public good and therefore every participant is better off if the public good is provided and the all the teammates share the cost, but there are incentives to free/ride, subjects normally contribute with between 40 and 60% of their endowment.
When played repeatedly, however, the amount of cooperation diminishes sharply, providing foundation for the fact that our degree of collaboration is variable and can depend on the context.
For example, in double-auction markets experiments, where individuals are not specifically given the chance to collaborate with other individuals but there is an option to be altruistic towards others by accepting payoffs that are lower than the maximum possibly payoff , people normally maximize their own payoffs disregarding those of the others and altruism is not observed.
A great number of scientists studying the evolution and implications of the Human cooperation have pointed out several reasons that might be prompting variations in
25 unselfish and collaborative behavior among members of a group. Fehr and Schmidt (1999) proposed a model based on inequity aversion and fairness.
They assume that individuals have different preferences with regards to how much they like equity and include the parameters α and β that account for individuals’ preferences for advantageous and disadvantageous inequity. They showed that, in an Ultimatum Game played repeatedly, the preferences for equity of the rest of individuals could influence individual’s own choices.
If most of the individuals behave consistently in a certain way, such as maximizing payoffs in a double-auction market experiment, individuals that belong to the same group can tend to copy the behavior that they commonly observe from the rest of individuals. This is known as compliance to the social norm.
2.4.2 Social Norms as a driver of collaboration
Social Norms are standards of behavior that are based on widely shared beliefs of how individual group members should behave in a given situation (Fehr and Fischbacher, 2004).
Individuals, during their lifetime, are members of a large number of groups. Different groups can have different Social Norms that drive individuals to behave differently depending on the relevant group. For instance, behavior that is acceptable when attending a soccer game with a group of fans in a stadium may not be acceptable in a work environment. Therefore, different social norms can arise among peers, family members, organizations or even the entire society.
Fehr and Fischbacher (2004) point to Social Norms as the driving force of human cooperation among non-genetically related individuals. As noted by them, cooperation among humans is largely based on social norms, including modern societies, where a considerable amount of cooperation is due to the legal enforcement of rules. They point out that for legal enforcement institutions to exist, their rules and punishments should be backed by what the society and a broad consensus on the legitimacy of the rules.
26 According to Fehr and Fischbacher (2014), the formation of Social Norms is commonly believed to occur when someone’s actions cause negative or positive externalities to other individuals. The maintenance of such rules depends on the willingness of other individuals to punish behavior that is not in line with the socially accepted norms. Public game experiments can capture the situation described above. According to Fehr and Fischbacher, the fact that other player’s actions can influence the own payoff is believed to create a necessity for a social norm. For example, if the participants of a public game are required to contribute to a public account with some kind of effort, it beneficial for ever team member that the other team members work hard.
Fehr and Fischbacher propose that human cooperation is largely based on a social norm of conditional cooperation for which individuals cooperate if other team members cooperate and defect when they are legitimized to do so, that is, when the rest of individuals defect. This idea is supported by multitude of experiments in which increases of the average contributions of the other team members lead to the own increase in public good contribution. (Fischbacher et. al. 2001, Keser and van Winden, 2000 Brandt and Schram, 2001)
2.4.3 Sanctioning norm violators
As some individuals exhibit consistent cooperative behaviors in social experiments and react positively to the rest of the participants’ cooperative behavior, some others act selfishly regardless of the behavior of others.
The existence of individuals who violate the social norm of cooperation suggests that, if social norms are important determinants of human cooperation, individuals must have mechanisms to sanction norm violators. Otherwise, unselfish behavior would spread throughout groups and collaboration would be unsustainable.
Evidence suggests that stable cooperation, without a mechanism to enforce the compliance to the social norm, is hardly ever found in repeated public-goods experiments. (Dawes and Thaler 1988, Ledyard 1995). A good question is, therefore, what are the mechanisms that have allowed individuals to reach cooperation if the
27 actions of unselfish individuals, as found empirically, decrease the average contribution of the rest of the participants in an experiment?
Sanctions are known to be a good way to enforce widespread collaboration. In fact one of the characteristics of social norms is that deviations from their compliance must be followed by some punishment (Fehr and Gachter 2000, 2002,), otherwise “norms would be discretionary and would not have bidding force” (Bendor and Swistak 2001) Fehr and Gatcher (2002) performed several experiments to investigate the impact of punishment opportunities on cooperation rates in repeated public-good experiments and found out that subjects’ average contributions to the public good (as a percentage of their endowment) typically started around a 50% in the “without-punishment” condition and had a downward trend as the rounds passed, whereas, the same individuals in the “with-punishment” condition started at an average contribution above 60% and showed an upward trend as several rounds were played, reaching almost full collaboration.
Because of the fear to social sanctions, subjects can support a norm and comply to it even if they would privately prefer not to do so. Individuals that privately reject the social norm have been shown to have a smaller likelihood to sanction deviations from that rule. Therefore, if a sufficient number of individuals disagree with the norm and don’t punish those who break it, the Social Norm may slowly change. .
Sanctions can generate distress in the norm-violator. Even a week sanction such as making salient the deviation from the social norm of a certain individual within the community can be effective because of the social shame or guilt that it may cause to the norm-violator when other members of the group learn about her behavior. (Nelissen and Zeelenberg, 2009).
2.4.4 Private Norms
Private Norms are standards of behavior normally learnt during childhood and developed during adulthood that determine how individuals react to decision-making problems when there is no risk for social punishment.
28 Private norms can be fueled by guilt and anxiety (Elster J, 1989). For instance, someone could decide buy in a certain clothing shop because she considers that the employees manufacturing the clothes are treated unfairly and therefore she may experience guilt if she purchased a product in such store.
Private norms can sometimes conflict with the social norm. For instance, if the same individual that rejects shopping in such store decides to go out for shopping with a group of colleagues that do not share the same private norms. These individuals might be unaware of how this firm treats their employees or simply unwilling to turn down the opportunity to buy fashionable, affordable, clothes.
In this case, the social norm of the group and the Private norm of the individual are at conflict and the individual will have to decide between feeling guilty for participating in the activity or the potential social shame, perhaps even exclusion from the group, generated as a result of informing other members that she is not willing to participate in buying clothes from shops that use cheap labor force and offer employees poor conditions.
2.4.5 Interplay between social norms, private norms and free riding
Behavioral Scientists have made a substantial progress describing and understanding social norms and private norms and the way collaboration is enforced. Some of them have attempted to use our knowledge about social norms to influence people to make sustainable and pro-social decisions. For instance, researchers have examined the relationship between the saliency of social and private norms and pro-social behavior. (Bateson et al. 2006) performed a field experiment in the coffee room of a university department in which coffee, tea and milk consumption is founded by contributions of the members of the department in a so-called “Honesty-Box”.
The experimenters tried to strengthen the impact of the Social Norm: “Contribute if you consume” and reduce free riding by placing photos of pairs of eyes that seemed to be looking directly to the user of the coffee machine. The results showed that the average contribution across all the treatments including a display with photos of eyes was larger than those that displayed photos of flowers.
29 (Beaman et al. 1979) performed an experiment in which they placed a mirror in front of a candy box for Halloween. Children, asking door to door for candy, were told “The candies are in the living room, go help yourself” (Nonstandard condition) and “The candies are in the living room, you can take one” (Standard condition). The average number of candies picked by the kids decreased with the introduction of the mirror in both standard and nonstandard conditions. This study shows that self-awareness can enhance compliance to the norms, even if these norms are imposed by a third party.
2.4.6. Social Norms and Altruism
Michael Sanders (2013), Chief Scientist and Head of Research and Evaluation in the BIT, claims that individuals “are more likely to give to charity if they see it as the Social Norm” and points out the “influence of prominent individuals to send strong signals to the community”.
In 2002, the BIT along with HMRC performed an experiment in which employees were sent “winter greeting cards” from other HMRC employees who currently give to charity explaining why they do so and inviting their colleagues to join them. Including a picture of the employees that suggested such donation pushed employees’ sign up rate to 6.4%. Messages that did not include a photo only reached a 2.9% sign up rate. The research of the BIT suggests that, by increasing the visibility of the acts of giving of individuals within one’s social group, charities or organizations can influence other members of the social group to increase their donations.
Promising potential donors to make their identity public within the community can also have important consequences in how much individuals are willing to donate. (Cotterill et. al. 2010) showed that by promising donors to publish a list with the names of individuals that contributed with at least one book to a local library in South Africa, the number of book donations increased significantly compared to the control group that was simply asked to donate books without the promise of public recognition.
Researchers have also noted that letting the community know the average donation of the rest of participants can have an influence on their donations. (Smith, et.al. 2012)
30 conducted a field study in which they investigated whether donors are influenced by the donations of other peers in the context of individual online fund-raising. For doing that, they placed a virtual box that displayed the previous donations of other peers next to the box that participants had to fill indicating the amount that they wished to donate to a charitable campaign.
They found positive and sizeable peer effects: a £10 increase in the mean of past donations increased giving by £2.50, on average. Donations responded to both, very large and very small amounts and to changes in the mode. With such results, the authors suggest that individuals use information from previous members of the group to decide what is appropriate for them to give.
Martin and Randal (2008) performed in a natural experiment in which they placed a transparent charity-box in the middle of an art gallery. The box was filled, prior to the experiment, with a certain amount of money that was constant for every condition except for the ”empty box condition”, however the way in which this money was displayed changed across conditions with more or less coinage or more or less bills. The analysis of the money collected across conditions showed that the composition of the initial amount of money placed in the box had a significant effect on both, the amount of money collected and the final composition in terms of bills and coins in the transparent box.
2.4.7 A real life example of the combination of Social Norms and Altruism
The Ice Bucket Challenge is a very good example of how altruistic initiatives and social norms can be combined and brought to the largest scale with the aid of Social Media and Social Networks. This challenge’s main goal was to raise funds for medical research into amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and consisted on pouring a bucket of ice water on one’s head and nominating other peers to do the same, normally, within a 24 hours period to comply. Those who were nominated but failed to submit the video within the next 24 hours were supposed to make charitable donation to ALS.
The Charities Aid Foundation estimated that in the UK, 10% of those who participated in the Ice Bucket Challenge actually donated to a charity.
31 People’s contribution as a result of the Ice Bucket Challenge increased the money collected by ALS Charities in more than 100 million pounds with respect to the same period the previous year, situating ALS in the same ballpark as major cancer charities in terms of raised funds. This event gathered altruism, competitiveness, social exposure and accessibility and triumphed everywhere in the world.
2.5 Conclusion
A large body of experimental research shows that altruistic behavior can be enhanced by modifying the frame of decision-making problems.
Using choice architecture and our knowledge about Heuristics and Cognitive Biases, Several scholars, NGOs, firms and public institutions have demonstrated that it is possible to increase charitable giving without restricting the choices of individuals or changing their economic incentives. Their work has influenced this thesis and helped me build my experiment.
32 Chapter 3. METHODOLOGY
The design and implementation of the experiment was supported by “Wishing Spiral S.L.”, a consulting agency located in the metropolitan area of Barcelona. This agency gives advice to NGOs and other types of charities and collaborates with some of them by designing fundraising campaigns and providing innovative personalized charity boxes to a large number of small businesses located in the regions of Madrid, Valencia, Aragón, Catalonia, Basque Country and Andalusia, Spain.
Wishing Spiral put me in touch with “Afanoc”, a Catalan NGO that tries to improve the life of children with cancer and their families by offering them free medical and psychological advice and free accommodation to those that have to travel in order to receive treatment.
From a list of 75 small businesses that were collaborating or had collaborated at some point during the past with Afanoc, including Restaurants, Pharmacies, Barber Shops, Beauty Salons, Tobacco shops and Clothes Shops, 30 were randomly selected to participate. Wishing Spiral informed them about the design of the experiment and invited them to participate. Some of them declined the invitation so Wishing Spiral proceeded to inform a new randomly selected potential participant about the experiment until the list of 30 was complete.
3.1 Participants
The 30 participants were divided into three categories, Health, Food/Tobacco and Fashion. Health included beauty salons and barber shops, Food/Tobacco included restaurants, bars and tobacco shops, and Fashion included clothing shops. Table 3.1 shows the distribution of participants by type of small business and category.
33
Table 3.1
3.2 Timeline of the Experiment
The experiment started on July 5th and finished on August 3rd. On July 19th, Wishing Spiral collected for the first time the Survey Boxes, counted the raised funds and placed traditional boxes in the small businesses that were initially assigned to the Survey Box Treatment. After that, they collected the Traditional Boxes, counted the money collected and placed Survey Boxes at the small businesses that were initially in the Traditional-Box treatment. On August 3rd all the boxes, Survey and Traditional, were collected and counted.
3.3 Treatments:
My experiment has a within subjects design. Participants were subjected to both treatments, ‘Traditional Box” and “Survey Box” for a period of 2 weeks per treatment. For the first 2 weeks of the experiment, 15 participants were randomly assigned to each of the 2 treatments and after that, the treatments were inverted so that those in the “Survey Box” treatment were moved to the “Traditional Box” treatment and vice versa.
3.3.1 Traditional Box treatment
A Traditional Box was placed in all the small business for 14 days, half of the duration of the experiment. It includes only one transparent cubicle and the logo of Afanoc. The Traditional Box treatment serves as a baseline and will be compared with the performance of the Survey Boxes.
Barber Shop 6
Beauty Salon 5
Restaurant 5
Bar 4
Tobacco Shop 1
Clothes shop 9 Fashion
Health Food/Tobacco
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3.3.2 Survey Box treatment
The Survey Box was designed as an interactive cue that aims to attract individuals and invite them to vote and donate at the same time. It includes two cubicles, in which the coins or notes will be deposited as well as a display of a question. The cubicles and the question aim to create the illusion of a real-time survey, allowing the user to vote by choosing one of the two options. Each cubicle is transparent and displays the coins collected, allowing a public opinion poll to be generated.
Afanoc allowed me to label both the Traditional and the Survey Boxes with their logo and some extra information about their organization, giving the boxes credibility.
Traditional Box used in the experiment
35 3.4 Questions:
Two types of questions were used, controversial and non-controversial. 3 Controversial questions asked about polemic topics in the Spanish Society, highly covered by the Media whereas 3 Non-controversial questions asked about personal preferences. The reason for this choice is because I want to examine whether controversial questions are more attractive than questions about personal preferences and therefore whether Survey Boxes that display a controversial question can raise, on average, more money than those that display a non-controversial question.
3.4.1 Controversial
The controversial questions were chosen among a list of questions that one of the most popular Spanish Newspaper had asked, in a virtual survey setting, to the visitants of their webpage in the 6 months prior to the experiment. The 3 of them made reference to a controversial topic of the Spanish Society. Some of the questions were shortened and adapted to fit the display.
Unfortunately, one of these controversial questions had to be discarded because it included the logo of Uber, a company forced to terminate all transportation activities in Spain due to the infringement of the Spanish Transport Law.
Since one of the questions was discarded, only two types of controversial questions remained and were included. 7 controversial questions of each type were randomly distributed among the small businesses that were assigned to the “controversial sub-condition” and an extra randomly chosen “Type 2 controversial question” was included. The images below show the display of the controversial questions.
36
3.4.2 Non-Controversial Questions
3 Controversial questions asked individuals about their preferences in non-controversial topics such as their favorite kind of beverage in summer, the type of activity that they enjoy doing at the beach or their favorite type of swimsuit. They were observed in one of the most popular (Spanish) virtual forums and some of them were modified to fit the display.
The arrangement of the questions in this sub-condition was not randomized but chosen in an attempt to choose a relevant audience for every type of non-controversial questions. The questions were selected so that they have a certain degree of compatibility with the small business they are placed in. I consider that the controversial questions were adequate for all kinds of publics and may be appealing to all types of audiences regardless of the context, whereas certain questions included in the non-controversial condition might not be relevant for all audiences. For instance, there is a question that asks individuals about their favorite kind of swimsuit. If this question were placed in a Bar or Restaurant, the saliency of the Survey Box might have been decreased.
Should Spain ban shows that involve animals? Yes/No
*In Spain, bullfights are allowed in the majority of regions
Brexit is approaching, who do you think will be worse off?
United Kingdom/European Union Type 2 Controversial Question Type 1 Controversial Question
37 For that reason, I divided the questions into 3 categories; Health, Fashion and Drinks. The health question was distributed among Beauty Salons and barber shops, Fashion were distributed among clothing stores and Food/Tobacco were distributed among bars, restaurants and tobacco shops. The images below show the displays of the three non-controversial questions.
What´s your favorite type of swimsuit? Bikini or One piece.
Type 3 Non-Controversial Question (Fashion)
Type 2 Non-Controversial Question (Drinks)
How do you enjoy sunny days the most? Umbrella and beer / towel and sunscreen.
Queen of summer? Beer or Sangria
38 3.5 Limitations
Wishing Spiral was in charge of the maintenance and change of the necessary boxes. Unfortunately, 5 participants had to be dropped out of the study. The reason is that these small businesses reported that the Survey Boxes were unsafe and therefore they decided to remove them. The participants excluded were 2 restaurants, 2 Beauty Salons and 1 Clothing Shop. Therefore, only 25 participants remained during the entire experiment. 9 participants remained in the health category, 8 in the Food and Tobacco and 8 in the Fashion category.
As 5 businesses removed their Survey Boxes for safety reasons, some of the questions that they were assigned to display were discarded from the experiment and the analysis of the results. Specifically, 2 Type 1 Non-Controversial Question (Health), 2 Type 2 Non-Controversial Question (Drinks) and 1 Type 1 Controversial Question (Animals) were discarded as a consequence of the dropout. Table 3.2 shows the distribution of controversial and non-controversial questions among the shops that remained during the entire experiment. Table 3.3 gives a detailed description of the number and type of questions used per shop category.
Table 3.2
Health 7 Health 2 Health 9
Food/Tobacco 4 Food/Tobacco 4 Food/Tobacco 8
Fashion 3 Fashion 5 Fashion 8
Total 14 Total 11 Total 25
TOTAL
Survey Condition Participants
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Table 3.3
3.6 Hypothesis
With this experiment I want to examine the power that an interactive survey has when it is combined with a charity box, so that donating and voting become the same action. I will compare the average funds raised by Traditional and Survey Boxes and test my research hypothesis; (H1) “Charity boxes placed in Small Businesses in Barcelona and presented in a Survey Box setting will raise, on average, more money than charity boxes placed in the same small businesses but presented in a “Traditional Box setting”. Moreover, by dividing the questions displayed by the Survey Boxes into 2 categories, controversial and non-controversial I plan to test my hypothesis (H2) Survey Boxes that display a controversial question will raise, on average, more money than Survey Boxes that display a non-controversial question”. I plan to answer this question looking at the differences between subjects.
The division of the small businesses into 3 categories, each with a different type of non-controversial question, may contribute to the analysis of the success or the failure of a certain type of question.
Health Food/Tobacco Fashion
Controversial Type 1 (Animals) 3 1 2 6
Controversial Type 2 (Brexit) 4 3 1 8
Non-controv. Type 1 (Health) 2 0 0 2
Non-controv. Type 2 (Food/Tobacco) 0 4 0 4
Non-controv. Type 3 (Fashion) 0 0 5 5
TOTAL PARTICIPANTS 9 8 8 25
40 CHAPTER 4. RESULTS
4.1 Survey Box treatment VS Traditional Box treatment
Money collected by the 25 small businesses under both treatments is shown in Graph 1. Contribution levels did not always increase with the introduction of the Survey Box. Specifically, 15 of the 25 businesses collected more money when they were using a Survey Box rather than a Traditional Box.
Graph 1
In both periods of the experiment, the amount of the contributions collected by Survey Boxes was greater than that collected by Traditional charity Boxes. On average, people contributed 1, 81 as much in the small businesses with Survey Boxes (mean=1.46) as with Traditional Boxes (mean=0.81). Moreover, the average collection in period 2 (mean=0.98) was 1.37 times greater than the average collection in period 1 (mean=1.35). Figure 1 displays the average money collected in both, the Survey Box and the Traditional Box treatments across parts.
