Would You Like to Round Up and Donate the Difference? Roundup Requests Reduce the Perceived Pain of Donating Katie Kelting Saint Louis University Stefanie Robinson North Carolina State University Richard J. Lutz University of Florida Accepted by Anirban Mukhopadhyay, Editor; Associate Editor, Simona Botti Recently, some companies have begun to ask their customers to “round up” transactions to the next highest dollar and donate the difference to charity. However, little is known about how consumers respond to such an appeal. Across a series of lab experiments and one large field study, we find that consumers respond more favorably to a roundup than to a flat donation request, even when the requested amount is identical. We find evidence that the effect arises because a roundup request reduces consumers’ perceived pain of donating. Three alternative explanations are examined (i.e., objective financial cost, inattention to donation cost, and per- ceived novelty of the request) but not supported. This research has important implications for both companies and nonprofits seeking to increase charitable donations from consumers. Keywords Rounding up; Prosocial behavior; Donation Recently a number of retailers have implemented a creative way for customers to donate to a good cause by “rounding up.” Specifically, stores (e.g., Whole Foods, J.C. Penney, Petco) and restaurants (e.g., California Pizza Kitchen, Tony Roma’s, The Original Pancake House) offer customers an opportunity, dur- ing checkout, to round up their total bill to the next whole dollar and donate the difference to a charity. The purpose of this research is to investigate how consumers respond to a roundup donation request relative to one for a flat financial amount. If consumers behave rationally, the decision to donate should be independent of the nature of the request that is made, especially when the financial amount being requested is equivalent. However, in the prosocial literature, an extensive body of work has shown that how one requests help matters (Ein- Gar & Levontin, 2013; White, MacDonnell, & Dahl, 2011). For example, consumers respond differently to appeals that highlight the benefits to self versus others (White & Peloza, 2009) and focus on in- ver- sus out-group victims (Duclos & Barasch, 2014). We seek to extend this literature by showing how roundup and flat donation requests differentially affect consumers’ prosocial behavior. Although donating money is a socially desirable behavior (Satow, 1975), it is nevertheless a financial loss to consumers. Since losses are painful (Thaler, 1985), consumers try to avoid them (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). However, objectively equivalent losses are not always experienced as equivalently painful by consumers (Raghubir & Srivastava, 2009; Soster, Gershoff, & Bearden, 2014). For example, consumers feel less pain spending money under conditions when they pay with credit (vs. cash) (Thomas, Desai, & Seenivasan, 2011) or experience strong (vs. weak) social support (Xu, Zhou, & Ye, 2015). Since spending and donating are both behav- iors that involve consumers parting with money (Oppenheimer & Olivola, 2010), we investigate whether a roundup (vs. flat) request can decrease consumers’ perceived pain of donating. Received 12 May 2017; accepted 20 May 2018 Available online 19 June 2018 The authors thank the Editor, the AE, the reviewers, Keith Coulter, Robin Coulter, Danit Ein-Gar, DaHee Han, Jim Madison, John Peloza, Yang Yang, and research seminar participants at North Carolina State University, Saint Louis University, and Washington University for their insightful comments and support. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Katie Kelting, Richard A. Chaifetz School of Business, Saint Louis University, 3647 Lindell Boulevard, Saint Louis, Missouri 63108, USA. Electronic mail may be sent to katie.kelting@slu.edu. © 2018 Society for Consumer Psychology All rights reserved. 1057-7408/2019/1532-7663/29(1)/70–78 DOI: 10.1002/jcpy.1064