Donor's Deferral and Return Behavior: Partial Identification from a Regression Discontinuity Design with Manipulation
Methodology
2025-07-15 v4 Applications
Machine Learning
Abstract
Volunteer labor can temporarily yield lower benefits to charities than its costs. In such instances, organizations may wish to defer volunteer donations to a later date. Exploiting a discontinuity in blood donations' eligibility criteria, we show that deferring donors reduces their future volunteerism. In our setting, medical staff manipulates donors' reported hemoglobin levels over a threshold to facilitate donation. Such manipulation invalidates standard regression discontinuity design. To circumvent this issue, we propose a procedure for obtaining partial identification bounds where manipulation is present. Our procedure is applicable in various regression discontinuity settings where the running variable is manipulated.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1910.02170,
title = {Donor's Deferral and Return Behavior: Partial Identification from a Regression Discontinuity Design with Manipulation},
author = {Evan Rosenman and Karthik Rajkumar and Romain Gauriot and Robert Slonim},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.02170},
year = {2025}
}