Marketing Seminar (2019-24)

Topic: With a Little Help from Friends: Strategic Fundraising and the Crowd

Speaker: Tingting Fan, assistant professor, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Time: Monday, 25 Nov, 13:30-15:00

Location: Room 217, Guanghua Building 2

Abstract:

This paper studies the information role of strategic fundraising from family and friends. Based on a crowdfunding and online social media data, we are able to identify contributions made by family and friends. While a large strand of literature considers financing from connected people as a signal of high-quality project, we show that it might be a signal of performance manipulation, and hence negatively correlated with the quality of the project. Entrepreneurs with mediocre early funding performance strategically allocate contributions from family and friends to encourage naïve funders to herd, while sophisticated funders are aware of potential manipulation and view fundraising from family and friends as a negative signal and are less likely to contribute. We found that even though the manipulation exists, projects with manipulation deliver poorer funding performance as sophisticated funders have significant market power.

Introduction:

Tingting Fan is an assistant professor at Department of Marketing, Business School of The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She got her Ph.D. from Stern School of Business, New York University. She got M.S. in Economics and B.A. in Business Administration at Peking University. Her research interest includes quantitative marketing, consumer experience with high-technology products and services, digital marketing (mobile phone, video games, and online social network), branding, and empirical IO (industrial organization). Her research has won research grants from Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative (WCAI), Marketing Science Institute (MSI), Hong Kong RGC, and Product Development Management Association (PDMA). She also won the most prestige University Education Award at CUHK in 2018.

Your participation is warmly welcomed!