Title: Identifying On-time Reward Delivery Projects with Estimating Delivery Duration on Kickstarter,
Abstract: In Crowdfunding platforms, people turn their prototype ideas into real
products by raising money from the crowd, or invest in someone else's projects.
In reward-based crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo,
selecting accurate reward delivery duration becomes crucial for creators,
backers, and platform providers to keep the trust between the creators and the
backers, and the trust between the platform providers and users. According to
Kickstarter, 35% backers did not receive rewards on time. Unfortunately, little
is known about on-time and late reward delivery projects, and there is no prior
work to estimate reward delivery duration. To fill the gap, in this paper, we
(i) extract novel features that reveal latent difficulty levels of project
rewards; (ii) build predictive models to identify whether a creator will
deliver all rewards in a project on time or not; and (iii) build a regression
model to estimate accurate reward delivery duration (i.e., how long it will
take to produce and deliver all the rewards). Experimental results show that
our models achieve good performance -- 82.5% accuracy, 78.1 RMSE, and 0.108
NRMSE at the first 5% of the longest reward delivery duration.