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.
@cite_4: Entrepreneurs are turning to crowdfunding as a way to finance their creative ideas. Crowdfunding involves relatively small contributions of many consumer-investors over a fixed time period (generally a few weeks). The purpose of this paper is to add to our empirical understanding of backer dynamics over the project funding cycle. Two years of publicly available data on projects listed on Kickstarter is used to establish that the typical pattern of project support is U-shaped — in general, backers are more likely to contribute to a project in the first and last week as compared to the middle period of the funding cycle. We further establish that this U-shape pattern of support is pervasive across projects, including both successfully and unsuccessfully funded projects, those with large and small goals, and projects in different categories. We then empirically explore the dynamics associated with several factors, including collective attention effects from platform sorting options, the role of family and friends in supporting projects, the effects of social influence, and the role of project updates over the project funding cycle.
@cite_22: Crowdfunding -- in which people can raise funds through collaborative contributions of general public (i.e., crowd) -- has emerged as a billion dollars business for supporting more than one million ventures. However, very few research works have examined the process of crowdfunding. In particular, none has studied how social networks help crowdfunding projects to succeed. To gain insights into the effects of social networks in crowdfunding, we analyze the hidden connections between the fundraising results of projects on crowdfunding websites and the corresponding promotion campaigns in social media. Our analysis considers the dynamics of crowdfunding from two aspects: how fundraising activities and promotional activities on social media simultaneously evolve over time, and how the promotion campaigns influence the final outcomes. From our investigation, we identify a number of important principles that provide a useful guide for devising effective campaigns. For example, we observe temporal distribution of customer interest, strong correlations between a crowdfunding project's early promotional activities and the final outcomes, and the importance of concurrent promotion from multiple sources. We then show that these discoveries can help predict several important quantities, including overall popularity and the success rate of the project. Finally, we show how to use these discoveries to help design crowdfunding sites.
@cite_8: Crowdfunding is changing how, why, and which ideas are brought into existence. With the increasing number of crowdfunded projects, it is important to understand what drives people to either create or fund these projects. To shed light on this new social phenomenon, we present a grounded theory of motivation informed by the first cross-platform qualitative study of the crowdfunding community. By performing 83 semistructured interviews, we uncover creator motivations, which include the desire to raise funds, expand awareness of work, connect with others, gain approval, maintain control, and learn; and supporter motivations, which include the desire to collect rewards, help others, support causes, and be part of a community. We also explore deterrents to crowdfunding participation, including, among creators, fear of failure, and, for supporters, lack of trust. Based on these findings, we provide three emergent design principles to inform the design of effective crowdfunding platforms and support tools.
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@cite_3: The basic idea of crowdfunding is to raise external finance from a large audience (the “crowd”), where each individual provides a very small amount, instead of soliciting a small group of sophisticated investors. The paper develops a model that associates crowdfunding with pre-ordering and price discrimination, and studies the conditions under which crowdfunding is preferred to traditional forms of external funding. Compared to traditional funding, crowdfunding has the advantage of offering an enhanced experience to some consumers and, thereby, of allowing the entrepreneur to practice menu pricing and extract a larger share of the consumer surplus; the disadvantage is that the entrepreneur is constrained in his her choice of prices by the amount of capital that he she needs to raise: the larger this amount, the more prices have to be twisted so as to attract a large number of “crowdfunders” who pre-order, and the less profitable the menu pricing scheme.
@cite_6: Personal social networks are considered as one of the most influential sources in shaping a customer's attitudes and behaviors. However, the interactions with friends or colleagues in social networks of individual customers are barely observable in most e-commerce companies. In this paper, we study the problem of customer identification in social networks, i.e., connecting customer accounts at e-commerce sites to the corresponding user accounts in online social networks such as Twitter. Identifying customers in social networks is a crucial prerequisite for many potential marketing applications. These applications, for example, include personalized product recommendation based on social correlations, discovering community of customers, and maximizing product adoption and profits over social networks. We introduce a methodology CSI (Customer-Social Identification) for identifying customers in online social networks effectively by using the basic information of customers, such as username and purchase history. It consists of two key phases. The first phase constructs the features across networks that can be used to compare the similarity between pairs of accounts across networks with different schema (e.g. an e-commerce company and an online social network). The second phase identifies the top-K maximum similar and stable matched pairs of accounts across partially aligned networks. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that our CSI model consistently outperforms other commonly-used baselines on customer identification.
@cite_24: Crowdfunding provides a new opportunity for entrepre-neurs to launch ventures without having to rely on traditional funding mechanisms, such as banks and angel investing. Despite its rapid growth, we understand little about how crowdfunding users build ad hoc online communities to undertake this new way of performing entrepreneurial work. To better understand this phenomenon, we performed a qualitative study of 47 entrepreneurs who use crowdfunding platforms to raise funds for their projects. We identify community efforts to support crowdfunding work, such as providing mentorship to novices, giving feedback on campaign presentation, and building a repository of example projects to serve as models. We also identify where community efforts and technologies succeed and fail at support-ing the work in order to inform the design of crowdfunding support tools and systems.
@cite_19: Crowdfunding allows founders of for-profit, artistic, and cultural ventures to fund their efforts by drawing on relatively small contributions from a relatively large number of individuals using the internet, without standard financial intermediaries. Drawing on a dataset of over 48,500 projects with combined funding over $237 M, this paper offers a description of the underlying dynamics of success and failure among crowdfunded ventures. It suggests that personal networks and underlying project quality are associated with the success of crowdfunding efforts, and that geography is related to both the type of projects proposed and successful fundraising. Finally, I find that the vast majority of founders seem to fulfill their obligations to funders, but that over 75 deliver products later than expected, with the degree of delay predicted by the level and amount of funding a project receives. These results offer insight into the emerging phenomenon of crowdfunding, and also shed light more generally on the ways that the actions of founders may affect their ability to receive entrepreneurial financing.
@cite_27: Hundreds of thousands of crowdfunding campaigns have been launched, but more than half of them have failed. To better understand the factors affecting campaign outcomes, this paper targets the content and usage patterns of project updates -- communications intended to keep potential funders aware of a campaign's progress. We analyzed the content and usage patterns of a large corpus of project updates on Kickstarter, one of the largest crowdfunding platforms. Using semantic analysis techniques, we derived a taxonomy of the types of project updates created during campaigns, and found discrepancies between the design intent of a project update and the various uses in practice (e.g. social promotion). The analysis also showed that specific uses of updates had stronger associations with campaign success than the project's description. Design implications were formulated from the results to help designers better support various uses of updates in crowdfunding campaigns.
@cite_13: Crowdfunding is a process by which enterprises or individuals seek to secure project funding by soliciting pledges from potential donors, usually via an Internet platform. These platforms offer project initiators the ability to limit the number of times a certain reward is claimed by supporters. This can be used to either offer a reward, which is naturally limited, or to induce an artificial scarcity for rewards without a natural limitation. The induction of such artificial limitations represents a signal which may, fundamentally, either have a positive or a negative effect on the crowdfunding project. To answer this question, this paper not only discusses the theoretical effects of scarcity management in the crowdfunding context, but also investigates this empirically. The analysis of 42,996 projects from Indiegogo.com indicates that current scarcity management is problematic at best and reduces the chances of projects to successfully achieve their target funding.
@cite_20: Crowdfunding platforms have become important sites where people can create projects to seek funds toward turning their ideas into products, and back someone else's projects. As news media have reported successfully funded projects (e.g., Pebble Time, Coolest Cooler), more people have joined crowdfunding platforms and launched projects. But in spite of rapid growth of the number of users and projects, a project success rate at large has been decreasing because of launching projects without enough preparation and experience. Little is known about what reactions project creators made (e.g., giving up or making the failed projects better) when projects failed, and what types of successful projects we can find. To solve these problems, in this manuscript we (i) collect the largest datasets from Kickstarter, consisting of all project profiles, corresponding user profiles, projects' temporal data and users' social media information; (ii) analyze characteristics of successful projects, behaviors of users and understand dynamics of the crowdfunding platform; (iii) propose novel statistical approaches to predict whether a project will be successful and a range of expected pledged money of the project; (iv) develop predictive models and evaluate performance of the models; (v) analyze what reactions project creators had when project failed, and if they did not give up, how they made the failed projects successful; and (vi) cluster successful projects by their evolutional patterns of pledged money toward understanding what efforts project creators should make in order to get more pledged money. Our experimental results show that the predictive models can effectively predict project success and a range of expected pledged money.
@cite_11: Crowdfunding is a process where commercial or non-commercial projects are initiated in a public announcement by organizations or individuals to receive funding, assess the market potential, and build customer relationships. Crowdfunding is employed in a variety of different categories, ranging from technology to arts and even disaster relief. Even though crowd-funding has received widespread attention, not only in the media, literature on the subject is still sparse and lacks especially empirical research. In contrast, research in new product preannouncement is established and more mature, and, due to similarities in process and goals, yields entry points for crowdfunding research. This paper contributes by reducing the gap in crowdfunding research by drawing on insights from new product preannouncement literature. To this end, a common definition of crowdfunding, which is currently lacking in literature, is derived and used to characterize commonalities with new product preannouncement. This theoretical discussion is complemented by empirically testing the derived hypotheses about common success factors. Conclusions are drawn from the logistic-regression, using the technology category of a project dataset with 45,400 observations. Research shows that while timing and communication are key success factors, common to both new product preannouncement and crowdfunding, other success factors may already be standard and cannot separate the successful crowdfunding projects from the unsuccessful.
Researchers analyzed crowdfunding platforms @cite_3 @cite_8 . For example, @cite_4 showed the dynamics of Kickstarter donors. @cite_19 studied the dynamics of crowdfunding and revealed that personal networks and underlying project quality were related to the crowdfunding success. @cite_9 analyzed why people created and or backed projects in crowdfunding platforms. @cite_20 @cite_27 showed various factors to make a project successful in terms of the fundraising. Joenssen and M "u llerleile @cite_13 analyzed 42k Indiegogo projects, and discovered that scarcity management was problematic and reduced the chances of projects to successfully achieve the fundraising goal. Researchers @cite_24 @cite_6 @cite_22 studied the impact of social media and social communities in raising fund. @cite_11 showed that timing and communication were two key factors to make projects successful.