Browsing by Subject "Crowdfunding"

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    Essays on Supply Chain Finance
    (2016-10) Chen, Yibin
    This thesis contains essays addressing three different problems in supply chain finance, studying two important source of financing – trade credit and crowdfunding. In the first essay, we model a web-based retailer offering direct financing to its capital-constrained supplier who sells its products on a consignment basis. The supplier has access to bank financing and the retailer can specify debt-seniority. We show that if the retailer requires debt-seniority, then the supplier will use either bank or direct financing (but not both), and it may produce more than the first-best quantity. In contrast, if the retailer does not request seniority, the supplier may take both bank and direct financing, but it always produces less than the first-best quantity. We find that the retailer does not always prefer debt-seniority. In the second essay, we study variants of net-terms trade credit contracts in a traditional market, with market frictions of bankruptcy costs, information asymmetry and transaction costs. We provide a possible explanation for the prevalence of debt forgiveness in practice. We show that the supplier, by contracting and preannouncing forgiveness, can use one type of friction to mitigate another, and benefit both supply chain partners. The third essay studies the social proof effect in the rapidly diffused crowdfunding market. We study how prior capital accumulation and the volume of owner-issued referrals impact subsequent fundraising. By analyzing a campaign-level web traffic data set, we show that higher capital accumulation increases the probability of contribution for the owner-referrals, the volume of organic visitors and the total volume of organic contributors, although it may decrease probability of contribution from the organic visitors. To study the optimal policy for entrepreneurs to use their referrals, we build a Markov-decision-process model and calibrate its parameters using our data. Our finding indicates that entrepreneurs in general should distribute their referrals over the course of the entire campaign.
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    Is Crowdfunding Altruistic or Egoistic? The Influences of Social Cause and Message Types on Prosocial Motives and Online Cause-related Crowdfunding
    (2018-07) Kim, Yumin
    The objectives of this study were to test: (1) the effects of social cause type and message type on crowdfunding behavior, (2) the mediating effects of prosocial motives on relationship between social cause/message types and crowdfunding behavior, and (3) the interaction effects of social cause type and message type on prosocial motives and crowdfunding behavior. Based on Batson’s (1997) path model of altruistic and egoistic motives for helping, a comprehensive model for this study was developed to test the interrelationship among social cause and message types, prosocial motives, and crowdfunding behavior. This study designed a between-subjects 2 (social cause types: primary vs. secondary needs) 2 (message types: participative vs. promotional) factorial online experiment. It contains a cause-related crowdfunding campaign with two attributes: (1) social cause type whether it is a human primary need or a secondary need and (2) message type whether it is participative or promotional. Participants were randomly assigned to respond to one of four cause-related campaign conditions (i.e., health cause with participative message, health cause with promotional message, art cause with participative message, or art cause with promotional message). A total of 318 responses were used for data analysis. A multivariate analysis of variance indicated that there was a significant main effect of social cause types on the combined crowdfunding behavioral outcomes (i.e., attitude toward the cause-related campaign, willingness to participate and share information with others, crowdfunding intention). Individuals exposed to a primary cause had higher crowdfunding behavioral responses than those exposed to a secondary cause in the cause-related crowdfunding campaign. However, there was no main effect of message types (i.e., participative vs. promotional) on the crowdfunding behavior. There was a significant mediating effect of prosocial motives (i.e., perceived reward, personal distress, empathy). An analysis of variance also indicated that empathy mediates all behavioral outcomes while personal distress influences only attitude toward the cause-related campaign and perceived reward influences only crowdfunding intention and willingness to participate/share. The prosocial motives for crowdfunding play a mediating role in the relationship between social cause/message types and crowdfunding behavior. This suggests that individuals had both egoistic motives (i.e., perceived reward, personal distress) and altruistic motives (i.e., empathy) for cause-related crowdfunding. In addition, there were interaction effects of social cause type and message type on prosocial motives and crowdfunding intention. Theoretical and practical implications, and limitations and suggestions for future research were provided based on the findings.