Abstract:As mobile payment popularizes in China, online fundraising has become an important trend. Many novel fundraising strategies have emerged, including one we call “randomly generated donations.” This paper employs a randomized controlled experiment to examine how donor behavior is affected by two main design features of randomly generated donations: nonbinding small suggested donations and delegation to a random device. Our experimental data suggests that both features have no significant effect on the donation rate. Furthermore, we find that small suggested donations significantly reduced the donation size. We also find that a delegation device can partially offset the negative effect of small suggestions on the donation size. These results inform fundraisers that, when designing a fundraising strategy, they should carefully consider the parameter choice for each feature and the interaction of different features in affecting donor choice.