This volume consists of nine papers that use experimental and theoretical tools to examine issues pertaining to charitable auctions and fundraising. In recent years, the revenue-generating effects of different fundraising techniques have been a subject of increasing policy interest as private, religious and state originations have come to rely increasingly on fundraising activities for revenues. Experimental methods provide an ideal context for conducting the dialogue between economists, fundraisers and policymakers regarding the revenue and social consequences of alternative fundraising...

For several decades, the orthodox economics approach to understanding choice under risk has been to assume that each individual person maximizes some sort of personal utility function defined over purchasing power. This new volume contests that even the best wisdom from the orthodox theory has not yet been able to do better than supposedly naive models that use rules of thumb, or that focus on the consumption possibilities and economic constraints facing the individual.

The authors assert this by first revisiting the origins of orthodox theory. They then recount decades of...