Chapter 19 from the Handbook of the Economics of Giving, Altruism and Reciprocity analyzes how donationbased nonprofits work and why people give to them instead of giving directly to individuals.
It looks at how these organizations are structured, how they raise and use money, and what kinds of public goods they provide, using economic models to explain their behavior. This resource helps explain how legal rules (like the nondistribution constraint), donor behavior, and organizational choices interact, and why some nonprofits’ funding models support mission-driven decisions while others create tensions or tradeoffs.