Motives for Donating: What Inspires Our Decisions to Make a Donation to Non-profit Organisations?1

Abstract

Motivation represents a foundation cornerstone on which analyses in a number of humanities and social sciences are built. For a long time, economists have seen motivation as connected with the act of giving, trying to interpret it in the context of the neoclassical economics assumptions. The objective of this paper is to find answers to the question of what mainly motivates the Czech population in their decisions to make a donation and whether there is any interdependence among such motives. We also ask what the relationship is between the determining motives and the rate or frequency of donating. The donation models that we analyze and use as the basis of our research are nowadays considered being the principal or at least interesting donation models commonly taken into account by economists in their work. We have only focused on selected microeconomics models to make the text clearly targeted; specifically, we are examining the public goods model, private consumption model investment model and impure altruism model. The data were collected through a questionnaire survey and analysed by means of mathematical-statistical methods that are commonly used in similar cases, such as descriptive statistics, the Pearson correlation coefficient and the ANOVA method based on the F-test. The empirical testing confirmed several assumptions connecting with this type of a research; however, our paper opened a space for a follow-up research, too.

Keywords

• altruism
• charitable giving
• motive
• c91
• d01
• d64