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Korean Academic Society of Business Administration
[ Article ]
korean management review - Vol. 52, No. 1, pp.249-275
ISSN: 1226-1874 (Print)
Print publication date 28 Feb 2023
Received 11 Sep 2022 Revised 30 Oct 2022 Accepted 15 Nov 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17287/kmr.2023.52.1.249

Threat on Society or Health? How Different Framing of Covid-19 Affects People’s Willingness to Give Money and Time

Jihoon Jhang ; Jenny Jeongeun Yoo ; Sangyoung Song
(First Author) College of Business, University of Central Arkansas jjhang@uca.edu
(Co-Author) Hanyang University wjddms1968@hanyang.ac.kr
(Corresponding Author) Hanyang University songs@hanyang.ac.kr
사회 또는 건강에의 위협? 코비드19의 프레이밍이 사람들의 돈과 시간의 기부의사에 미치는 영향에 관한 연구


Copyright 2011 THE KOREAN ACADEMIC SOCIETY OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

As the coronavirus outbreak spreads, the pandemic has affected every region of the world, and its impacts are multi-fold; economic, political, and social. This research investigates how Covid-19 influences individuals’ prosocial intentions and behaviors through a random experiment and analysis of field data from a crowdfunding platform. When Covid-19 is described as a disease impacting society (vs. individual’s health), people perceive its threat more severely. We find that participants’ age moderates this relationship between Covid-19 descriptions and perceived severity. While perceived severity linearly increases with age in the health perspective condition, it does not vary by age in the social perspective condition. More importantly, this increased perception of Covid-19 severity subsequently leads to a higher willingness to help others with money (i.e., donation) but not with time (i.e., volunteering). We use a difference-in-difference approach using large data from a loan-based crowdfunding platform, Kiva, and find that projects with society-related words yield higher funding success rates than those with health-related words after Covid-19. Our results suggest that highlighting the social aspect of Covid-19 rather than health-related issues would be a more effective communication strategy for encouraging prosocial behaviors.

Keywords:

Covid-19, Prosocial Behaviors, Perceived Severity, Age Difference, Multi-methods Approach, Text Analysis

Acknowledgments

This research won the grand prize in the Community Chest of Korea Research Competition (2020년 제2회 사랑의열매 학술상) and the authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of Community Chest of Korea (사랑의열매).

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∙ The author Jihoon Jhang is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at University of Central Arkansas. Prior to the current position, he served as a faculty member at Oklahoma State University and Hanyang University. He received his Ph.D. from the Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado at Boulder. His research interests include consumer decision making, hospitality and tourism management, and prosocial behavior. He has published articles in journals such as Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Psychology and Marketing, Journal of Travel Research, and International Journal of Hospitality Management.

∙ The author Jenny Jeongeun Yoo is a doctoral student at Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea. She received her Master’s Degree in Marketing at Hanyang University. Her major research area includes customer analytics, consumer behavior, and prosocial behavior.

∙ The author Sangyoung Song is an Associate Professor at Hanyang Business School, Hanyang University. He received his Ph.D. from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include customer analytics and empirical modeling of customer decision making. He has published articles in journals such as Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS), Quantitative Marketing and Economics (QME), and Geographical Analysis.