报告简介: 

This paper investigates how a crowdfunding campaign’s voluntary disclosure of the sensitive cost information affects its funding performance in a hybrid award-donation setting. Instead of enhancing a campaign’s marketing traits, project budget as a novel information provision tool reminds the crowd the behind-the-scenes operations for developing and executing a project. This resembles the radical practice of cost transparency recently observed in the retail industry and studied experimentally in the literature. We also examine how the disclosure effect is heterogenous across the campaign creator’s gender and the structure of the cost items (fixed versus variable costs). Methodology/results: Our data collection follows Kickstarter’s rollout of the Project Budget tool in 2019. We pre-process our project-level raw data via coarsened exact matching to construct a treatment sample (projects with budget) and a control sample (those without budget). Because of the voluntary nature of budget provision, we address the resulting endogeneity issue using the endogenous treatment effect model and peer average–style instruments. Budget provision on average increases funding performance by over 100%, which is more effective than many information provision tools studied in the literature. Female creators enjoy a 20%-30% higher benefit than male creators. A higher fixed cost (over total cost) ratio, which is indicative of a higher profit margin, significantly reduces the benefit but does not make disclosure backfire. Interestingly, donation amount and pure donors both increase with budget provision. Managerial implications: Showing the costs to customers can be highly effective in business settings where trust between stakeholders is critical, which implies a promising generalization to donation-based crowdfunding. Our results can also be used to guide a sequential rollout of the Project Budget feature across campaign categories and promote adoption rates.

报告人简介：

尚广志是佛罗里达州立大学商业分析、信息系统和供应链系Jim Moran运营管理副教授。他的研究成果发表在《生产与运营管理》(POM)、《运营管理杂志》(JOM)和《决策科学》(DS)等杂志上，并获得了POM、JOM和POM协会卓越运营学院的最佳论文奖。担任联合部门编辑的实证研究方法部门在JOM和零售运营部门在DS。他的评论服务获得了DS的2019年杰出审稿人奖和运营管理杂志的2018年最佳审稿人奖。他还被提名为POM的最佳评论家和JOM的最佳副编辑。他与Mike Galbreth和Mark Ferguson在《逆向物流杂志》(Reverse Logistics Magazine)上共同撰写了一个名为“学术界观点”的专栏，旨在向处理消费者退货的行业专业人士传播最新的学术知识。

尚广志副教授目前的研究主要有三个主题:消费者退货管理、服务劳工问题和创新技术管理。他从多个角度研究了第一个问题，包括零售商应该如何制定最佳退货政策，OEM或零售商如何更好地预测退货数量，以及零售商如何评估其退货政策的价值。第二，他关注的是实时聊天联络中心的环境。研究问题包括客户等待体验对聊天进程的影响，座席从过去经验中学习的能力，以及客户-座席匹配问题。第三，他研究了加密货币和众筹平台等新兴金融科技。他喜欢做实践驱动的研究。他经常受邀在年度消费者回报大会等主要行业会议上发表演讲。

撰写：周静