What Mortality-Reminder Experiments Identify About Motives: Partial Identification and the Economic Value of Motive Evidence

Hamed Mohammadpour; Ghahreman Abdoli

Authors

Hamed Mohammadpour Faculty of Economics, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran Author https://orcid.org/0009-0008-1507-5714
Ghahreman Abdoli Faculty of Economics, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9398-5376

Keywords:

motive identification, mortality reminders, partial identification, economic choice, charitable giving

Abstract

Under standard design conditions, randomization identifies a mortality-reminder assignment effect on a prespecified economic choice, not why choice changed. The analysis separates this effect from arm-marginal changes in theory-indexed practical content and individual component transitions. Inferring noninstrumental concern for a specified other's good or the actor's own good requires defensible cross-arm alignment and four bridges: content, choice, measurement, and causal order. Under the paired-construction closure condition, other-good and self-good specifications can generate the same arm-specific observable-law family. Valid aligned component marginals yield sharp marginal Fréchet bounds on individual transitions, but not the joint transition law. Narrowing the supported state set may inform without changing action; motive evidence has economic decision value only if it changes a prespecified prediction, transport conclusion, policy ranking, minimax-regret choice, or welfare conclusion. A consequential-giving construction shows states sharing one baseline choice law can reverse the ranking of beneficiary-impact versus public-recognition fundraising policies. The dated, search-bounded map contains 221 records from 121 works. Of 93 source-version records in a post hoc five-gate audit, 18 records from 13 works met all criteria. Because the audited studies lack a common estimand, results are not pooled or vote-counted; the audited evidence supports no domain-general shift toward altruism or self-regard. The proposed eight-cell giving design varies cue, beneficiary impact, and truthful publicity; an actor-return-substitute follow-up tests prespecified causal-order predictions after independent validation that the substitute generates the targeted actor return. Under valid exclusions and decision-calibrated precision, the design can discriminate among economic-component restrictions; neither design point-identifies unrestricted practical motives.

Author Biographies

Hamed Mohammadpour, Faculty of Economics, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

PhD Candidate, Faculty of Economics, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.
Ghahreman Abdoli, Faculty of Economics, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

Professor, Faculty of Economics, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

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