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International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, and Prediction

SBP 2014: Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and Prediction pp 333–340Cite as

Emerging Dynamics in Crowdfunding Campaigns

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Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNISA,volume 8393)

Abstract

Crowdfunding platforms are becoming more and more popular for fund-raising of entrepreneurial ventures, but the success rate of crowdfunding campaigns is found to be less than 50%. Recent research has shown that, in addition to the quality and representations of project ideas, dynamics of investment during a crowdfunding campaign also play an important role in determining its success. To further understand the role of investment dynamics, we did an exploratory analysis of the time series of money pledges to campaigns in Kickstarter to investigate the extent to which simple inflows and first-order derivatives can predict the eventual success of campaigns. Using decision tree models, we found that there were discrete stages in money pledges that predicted the success of crowdfunding campaigns. Specifically, we found that, for the majority of projects that had the default campaign duration of one month in Kickstarter, money pledges inflow occurring in the initial 10% and 40-60%, and the first order derivative of inflow at 95-100% of the duration of the campaigns had the strongest impact on the success of campaigns. In addition, merely utilizing the initial 15% money inflows, which could be regarded as “seed money”, to build a predictor can correctly predict 84% of the success of campaigns. Implication of current results to crowdfunding campaigns is also discussed.

Keywords

  • Crowdfunding
  • predictor
  • decision tree
  • dynamic

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  • DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-05579-4_41
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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Computer Sci & Tech, University of Sci & Tech, China

    Huaming Rao

  2. Dept. of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

    Huaming Rao, Anbang Xu & Wai-Tat Fu

  3. Dept. of Automation, Tsinghua University, China

    Xiao Yang

Authors
  1. Huaming Rao
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  2. Anbang Xu
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  3. Xiao Yang
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  4. Wai-Tat Fu
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Social Complexity and Department of Computational Social Science, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, MS 6B2, 22030-4400, Fairfax, VA, USA

    William G. Kennedy

  2. University of Arkansas at Little Rock, 2801 South University Avenue, EIT Building, Room 553, 72204, Little Rock, AR, USA

    Nitin Agarwal

  3. Department of Computer Engineering, Rochester Institute of Technology, 83 Lomb Memorial Drive, Bldg 09, 14623-5603, Rochester, NY, USA

    Shanchieh Jay Yang

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© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Rao, H., Xu, A., Yang, X., Fu, WT. (2014). Emerging Dynamics in Crowdfunding Campaigns. In: Kennedy, W.G., Agarwal, N., Yang, S.J. (eds) Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and Prediction. SBP 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8393. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05579-4_41

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05579-4_41

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-05578-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-05579-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)