Volunteer's folly

What it is

Dobelli's argument that donating money earned doing what you do best often helps a cause more than volunteering time on tasks others could do more cheaply. It is an opportunity-cost argument rather than a bias in the strict sense, and it has critics.

Related

• Self-selection bias bias
  Both are about who ends up doing or reporting something and how that differs from everyone else.
• Motivation crowding bias
  Helping for free versus helping for pay changes motivation and the value of the help.

Appears in

• The 99 thinking errors in Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly#65: Volunteer's folly

References

• Wikipedia: Volunteer's folly en.wikipedia.org
• The 99 thinking errors in Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia: List of cognitive biases en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia: Cognitive bias codex en.wikipedia.org

More in “Deciding and acting: incentives, loss and commitment”