Literature Review on Warm glow: an emotional dividend?

Adreoni (1990) assumes that individuals are not indifferent between gifts made by themselves and
gifts made by others, including government, implying that donors contribution and givingbyothers
are not perfect substitutes, and concluding that redistributions to more altruistic people from less
altruistic ones will increase total provision. In addition, he emphasizes a potential need to develop
empirical models of charitable giving that account for warm-glow giving and the interdependence of
preferences.
OttoniWilhelm et al. (2014) tested pure and impure altruism and documented the main result from
the charitable giving environment established in the lab: that altruism is the predominant
explanation of why people give.
Adreoni (1995) suggests a behavioral asymmetry between the warm-glow of doing something good
and cold-pickle of doing something bad, experimentally documenting an asymmetric marginal
utility of helping.
Sanfey (2007) underlines that social decision-making including donations to charity are strongly
connected to behavioral performance and the underlying neurobiology while Dunn et al. (2014)
demonstrate that how people spend their money also matters for their happiness, documenting
benefits of prosocial spending emerging among adults around the world and suggesting an
investigation into whether the happiness benefits of prosocial spending extend to impact
investments, in which people invest money with the goal of aiding social or environmental causes
while also reaping a financial return.
Hoogendoorn (2011) utilizes a unique large-scale data from the 2009 survey on social
entrepreneurship covering Belgium and The Netherlands and documents that social entrepreneurs
distinguish themselves from their commercial counterparts by sharp social intentions that give them
a different rationale for their action.
Feddersen and Sandroni (2009) provide the basic concepts of warm-glow theory, showing that warm-
glow theory has empirical meaning, is falsifiable and can be non-parametrically tested like the
standard theory of the choice.





References
Andreoni, J. 1990. Impure Altruism and donations to public goods: a theory of warm-glow giving.
Economic Journal 100, 46477.
Andreoni, J. 1995. Warm-Glow versus Cold-Prickle: The Effects of Positive and Negative Framing on
Cooperation in Experiments. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 110(1):121.
Dunn, E. W., Aknin, L. B., and Norton, M. I.. 2014. Prosocial Spending and Happiness: Using Money to
Benefit Others Pays Off. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23(1), 41-47.
Feddersen, T. and Sandroni A. 2009. The Foundation of Warm-Glow Theory. Working paper.
Hoogendoorn, B. 2011. Social entrepreneurship in the modern economy: warm glow, cold feet.
Thesis (PhD Series No. 246). Rotterdam: Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), Erasmus
University, Rotterdam.
OttoniWilhelm, M., Vesterlund L., and Xie H. 2014. Why Do People Give? Testing Pure and Impure
Altruism. University of Pittsburgh. Working paper.
Sanfey, A.G. 2007. Social decision-making: Insights from game theory and neuroscience. Science
318:598602.