An effort to boost donation amounts for a charity succeeds, but not in the way we expected. I’ve been involved with Little League Baseball for many years now. Instead of charging admission during tournaments to cover costs, we “pass the hat.” This is where spectators are asked to toss money into a hat that is carried around at one point during each game. It used to be that many people would just pull a few pennies, nickels, and dimes out of their pockets, which makes for a lot of coin rolling, but doesn’t help the donation total much. Sending young people with a puppy around to carry the hat improves the haul somewhat, but better ideas were needed. A recent bright idea was to offer a league pin to anyone who donates $5 or more. At first this didn’t seem to help much because few people donated enough to get a pin. But there was a nice secondary effect; the typical donation became $2 instead of a few low denomination coins. Just mentioning $5 had the anchoring effect of draggi...