報告時間：3月25日上午10:30

 報告地點：旭日樓310室

 報告主題: Budget Disclosure in Crowdfunding: Information Asymmetry and Cost Transparency

 報告人：尚廣志 副教授

 主持人：沈濱 教授

報告簡介: 

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.

報告人簡介：

尚廣志是佛羅裡達州立大學商業分析、信息系統和供應鍊系Jim Moran運營管理副教授。他的研究成果發表在《生産與運營管理》(POM)、《運營管理雜志》(JOM)和《決策科學》(DS)等雜志上，并獲得了POM、JOM和POM協會卓越運營學院的最佳論文獎。他擔任聯合部門編輯的實證研究方法部門在JOM和零售運營部門在DS。他的評論服務獲得了DS的2019年傑出審稿人獎和運營管理雜志的2018年最佳審稿人獎。他還被提名為POM的最佳評論家和JOM的最佳副編輯。他與Mike Galbreth和Mark Ferguson在《逆向物流雜志》(Reverse Logistics Magazine)上共同撰寫了一個名為“學術界觀點”的專欄，旨在向處理消費者退貨的行業專業人士傳播最新的學術知識。

尚廣志副教授目前的研究主要有三個主題:消費者退貨管理、服務勞工問題和創新技術管理。他從多個角度研究了第一個問題，包括零售商應該如何制定最佳退貨政策，OEM或零售商如何更好地預測退貨數量，以及零售商如何評估其退貨政策的價值。第二，他關注的是實時聊天聯絡中心的環境。研究問題包括客戶等待體驗對聊天進程的影響，座席從過去經驗中學習的能力，以及客戶-座席匹配問題。第三，他研究了加密貨币和衆籌平台等新興金融科技。他喜歡做實踐驅動的研究。他經常受邀在年度消費者回報大會等主要行業會議上發表演講。