Donor's Deferral and Return Behavior: Partial Identification from a Regression Discontinuity Design with Manipulation
This work addresses the issue of volunteer management for charities, but it is incremental as it adapts existing methods to handle manipulation in a specific context.
The study tackled the problem of how deferring blood donors affects their future volunteerism by exploiting a discontinuity in eligibility criteria, finding that deferral reduces future donations. It also addressed manipulation of hemoglobin levels by proposing a partial identification method for regression discontinuity designs with manipulated running variables.
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.