Type and Duration
PhD-Thesis, September 2017 until August 2020 (finished)Coordinator
Hilti Chair of Business Process ManagementMain Research
Business Process ManagementField of Research
Process ManagementDescription
Crowdfunding is an Internet-based approach to raising capital through collective efforts of many individuals. In recent years, people have created tens of thousands of projects and campaigns that have collected billions of dollars through crowdfunding. Four basic crowdfunding practices have emerged: (1) donation-based crowdfunding, whereby investors are not compensated for their funding and which is usually used for charity projects; (2) lending-based crowdfunding, whereby investors are compensated with interest and which is usually used for private loans; (3) equity-based crowdfunding, whereby investors are compensated with shares or dividends and which is usually used for start-ups; and (4) reward-based crowdfunding, whereby investors are compensated with so-called rewards and which is usually used for creative projects. As of recently, established companies have also developed an interest in crowdfunding, although they typically do not use it to collect money but for purposes such as marketing, open innovation, and prototyping.Since its fundamental concepts, techniques, and practices are constantly changing, researchers from various fields increasingly study crowdfunding, including Information Systems researchers. However, few researchers have studied decision-making at the individual level with the help of experiments. Against this backdrop, the dissertation project experimentally explores decision processes in crowdfunding through a behavioral-economics lens. The dissertation is paper-based and thus covers a series of studies, each of which examines individuals' crowdfunding decisions from a different perspective.
Keywords
Crowdfunding, Behavioural Finance, Experimental Research
