Gil Peleg

Gil Peleg is a PhD Student at Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business & Management, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. He has started his academic career as a hotel management student in the Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment at the Hebrew university of Jerusalem, where he graduated with an M.A. in Agricultural Economics.

In the past three years, he has been teaching Math, Economics and Marketing. During all his studies he won several scholarships and achievements and published his first research on vacation consumption in Tourism Management.

Research Results

Society motivates individuals to act pro-socially, i.e. donate money, goods or volunteer in order to help others. By recognizing their good deeds, Society grants these individuals social reputation so they can be renowned as pro-social persons. However, those deeds are not the only thing being recognized, but also the individual self-sacrifice of the pro-social person, although self-sacrifice itself has no true value for the cause that the donation is given to. In my research, I aim to (1) find out the trade-off between the value of the deeds and self-sacrifice – (using sawtouth CBC and HB analysis) (2) develop a theoretical consumption model explaining that phenomenon and (3) try to investigate other social incentive models by perform lab experiments.

In order to reveal how society rewards pro-social behavior with respect to the value of the contribution (i.e. economic value or self-sacrifice) and the form of contribution (i.e. time or money) we build a CBC. Our instrument measures the reward one would get given her resources and behavior, and therefore, we combined four attributes for each donor: monetary donation, volunteering work (i.e. behavior) and income and leisure time (i.e. resources). Each attribute had four levels to avoid bias and the choice was out of three persons differ only by the levels of these attributes. Every respondent had to answer 16 questions (2 of them were fixed).

The HB analysis yield a model fit of 0.84 for the data. We have seen that social reward is given not only for the absolute value of the contribution, but also for the resources one has (i.e. her self-sacrifice). Our results show that the greater the number of volunteering hours the greater the social reward. However, when the volunteer has a lot of leisure time the social reward decreases. Analyzing monetary donation, we came to learn that society rewards the donation, like for volunteering work - the greater the value the reward increases, however social reward decreases with income. Therefore, we have shown that society rewards pro-social actions not only by their economic value but also by the self-sacrifice one has to make.

Moreover, further investigation shows that society rewards the value of the contribution around 65% of the reward is given for the contribution (summing up volunteering work and monetary donation) and 35% is given for the resources (summing up leisure time and income; i.e. the self-sacrifice).

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