Essays on Costly Charitable Fund-raising

Abstract

In this dissertation I present a theory of charitable fund-raising in which it is costly to solicit donors. The second chapter shows how optimizing fund-raisers will affect the equilibrium level of contributions, determine the set of givers, respond to government grants, and behave in the limit in replicator economies. The third chapter characterizes optimal fund-raising when the fund-raiser learns to become a more efficient solicitor through experience. This chapter also introduces a notion of excessive fund-raising and it shows how this is affected by learning.