The Research Department of Economics and Management of Tadbir Nikan Business, Marketing, and Finance Open 3092-6238 In Press 2027 12 01 What Mortality-Reminder Experiments Identify About Motives: Partial Identification and the Economic Value of Motive Evidence What Mortality-Reminder Experiments Identify About Motives: Partial Identification and the Economic Value of Motive Evidence 1 21 EN Journal Article 2026 08 05 <p>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.</p> https://bmfopen.com/index.php/bmfopen/article/download/583/428