Abstract: In recent years, scandals regarding many charitable organizations' malpractices for selfish ends have made them much less trusted by the public. The trust crisis has become a shackle for the development of charities in China. This paper constructs a theoretical model to investigate the impact mechanism of trust crisis on charitable donations, and discusses the coping strategies of trust crisis from the perspectives of donation form, information transparency and regulatory intensity. On this basis, 2002-2016 provincial panel data are used to carry out an empirical analysis. The result shows that the impact of trust crisis on charitable donation is significantly negative, the influence of trust crisis on non-monetary donation is relatively small compared with monetary donation, and the trust crisis has little influence on charitable organizations with high information transparency or high regulatory intensity. Policy implication of the results is that solution of trust crisis requires improving the management of non-monetary donations, regulating charity information disclosure system, encouraging and developing private charitable organizations, and promoting charity supervision system.

Key words: trust crisis, charity donation, dynamic game