Free Riding Bahavior Research In Environmental Donation Under Different Social Information

As the development of economics, environmental pollution becomes urgent issues all humans face. Due to the limitation of government ability, gathering all forces to protect environment becomes current emphasis, and donation to environmental organizations is one of the most common ways. However, because of the public goods characteristics, free-riding problems happen in the process of donation. But no related research about free-riding behavior in donation is referred to this special domain of environment protection. Hence, this paper researches the free-riding behavior in environmental donation.Although some scholars have studies the influence of social donation information and award on free-riding behavior in donation, the effect of the combination of these two is rarely studied. So, this paper introduces different social donation information and award into the research of free-riding issues in environmental donation. By analyzing people’s free-riding behavioral changes in different ways of combination, we want to find the most effect way to restrain the free-riding behavior in environmental donation.With the development of experimental economics, using the combination of experimental economics and computer software makes the researches of free-riding issues more accurate and easily. This paper uses software z-tree developed by University of Zurich to conduct the experiment and programmed different social donation information and award first. In the following experiment, the laboratory assistants control the process, which means they control the information participants receive to obtain plenty of experimental data. We found that experimental data obeys the same distribution by conducting non-parametric test. Then, we used comparative analysis to work out the results and verified the significance of the result by stata. The study found that social donation information, which is higher than the reference value,combined with materials award is the most effect way to restrain the free-riding behavior in environmental donation. Also, thistudy found that social donation information, which is lower than the reference value, combined with mental award will aggravate the free-riding behavior in environmental donation. Additionally, to some extent, age and salary will influence the free-riding behavior in environmental donation.The conclusion above gets a breakthrough to the free-riding issues in the domain ofenvironmental donation and effectively complements the void of the free-riding behavior in environmental donation, which lays a good theoretical foundation for further study. Moreover, the experimental data is reliable and has significant meaning,so the conclusion can be used in donor agencies to effectively decrease the free-riding behavior in environmental donation and to ourage the people to protect the environment. Therefore, the research in this paper has both theoretical and practical meaning.