Imperial College London
Alternate

DrJiahuaWu

Business School

Associate Professor of Operations
 
 
 
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Contact

 

+44 (0)20 7594 9851j.wu CV

 
 
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Location

 

386ABusiness School BuildingSouth Kensington Campus

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{Du:2022:10.1111/poms.13782,
author = {Du, L and Hu, M and Wu, J},
doi = {10.1111/poms.13782},
journal = {Production and Operations Management},
pages = {3543--3558},
title = {Contingent stimulus in crowdfunding},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/poms.13782},
volume = {31},
year = {2022}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - Reward-based crowdfunding is a form of innovative financing that allows project creators to raise funds frompotential backers to start their ventures. A crowdfunding project is successfully funded if and only if thepredetermined funding goal is achieved within a given time. We study the optimal timing of contingentlyplacing a “fulcrum” in the random pledging process, with the potential of tilting it towards success, whichwould be a win-win-win for the creator, backers, and platform. Specifically, we consider a model wherebackers arrive sequentially at a crowdfunding project. Upon arrival, a backer makes her pledging decisionby taking into account the expected success of the project. We characterize the dynamics of the project’spledging process. We show that there exists a cascade effect on backers’ pledging, which is mainly driven bythe all-or-nothing nature of crowdfunding projects. According to our data collected from the most popularonline crowdfunding platform, Kickstarter, the majority of projects fail to achieve their goals. To addressthis issue, we propose three contingent stimulus policies, namely, seeding, feature upgrade, and limited-timeoffer. As a result of the cascade effect on backers’ pledging, the optimal timing to apply stimulus policieshas a cutoff-time structure. Lastly, we show that the benefit of contingent policies is greatest in the middleof crowdfunding campaigns. Testing with the dataset of Kickstarter, we obtain empirical evidence that theprojects’ success rates improve by 14.6% on average with updates in the middle of the campaign and whenthe pledging progress is lagging.
AU  - Du,L
AU  - Hu,M
AU  - Wu,J
DO  - 10.1111/poms.13782
EP  - 3558
PY  - 2022///
SN  - 1059-1478
SP  - 3543
TI  - Contingent stimulus in crowdfunding
T2  - Production and Operations Management
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/poms.13782
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/97696
VL  - 31
ER  -
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