Welcome to the Behavioral Philanthropy Lab !

Our lab investigates social decision-making from a multidisciplinary point of view, with a specific focus on philanthropic behavior.

In this area we are studying how subsidy schemes impact charitable giving, investigating how to use Virtual Reality to elicit donations to charitable organizations, and developing a Natural Language Processing algorithm to map the Swiss philanthropic landscape.

The interdisciplinary spirit of our lab is reflected in the variety of topics our research addresses relying on methods from many traditions: 1) consumer behavior to study human biases and attention developing implicit and objective measures of brand familiarity; 2) behavioral finance, to investigate whether/why people choose to expose themselves to negative tail risk in circumstances where one major loss can eliminate all previous gains; 3) behavioral economics and cognitive psychology, studying how acute stress impacts honesty.

The lab is housed in the Geneva Finance Research Institute (GFRI) of the Geneva School of Economics and Management (GSEM) at the University of Geneva, and is directed by Professor Giuseppe Ugazio.