Enhancing fundraising with refund bonuses

The provision point mechanism as a method of funding threshold public goods is extended with refund bonuses. Each contributor not only has his contribution refunded in the case of insufficient contributions but also receives a refund bonus proportional to his proposed contribution. As long as the refund bonus pool does not exceed the net value of the public good, in equilibrium the public good is always provided and refund bonuses are never distributed. In this paper, we empirically investigate this extension of the provision point mechanism in a laboratory experiment by testing its properties on allocative and distributive efficiency, equilibrium coordination, and invariance to information distribution. Individuals respond to the incentives induced by refund bonuses as predicted, but systematic deviations exist that are consistent with quantal response equilibrium. Since this simple mechanism has considerable practical potential especially in crowdfunding, these promising initial results call for further experimental work

Contingent Wage Subsidy

This paper proposes a policy aimed at tackling unemployment that arises from macroeconomic coordination failure. The policy offers firms wage subsidies payable only if the total number of new hires made across the economy is below a prespecified threshold. Subsidies provide incentives for firms to create jobs but the policy's goal is to generate a sufficiently large amount of employment spillovers to set off hiring complementarities taking employment beyond the threshold. Thus, subsidies are not distributed but the policy achieves a Pareto improvement. The market structure is important for policy design. Aggregative game techniques prove useful for the oligopsonistic case.</p

Combinatorial Civic Crowdfunding with Budgeted Agents: Welfare Optimality at Equilibrium and Optimal Deviation

Civic Crowdfunding (CC) uses the ``power of the crowd'' to garner contributions towards public projects. As these projects are non-excludable, agents may prefer to ``free-ride,'' resulting in the project not being funded. For single project CC, researchers propose to provide refunds to incentivize agents to contribute, thereby guaranteeing the project's funding. These funding guarantees are applicable only when agents have an unlimited budget. This work focuses on a combinatorial setting, where multiple projects are available for CC and agents have a limited budget. We study certain specific conditions where funding can be guaranteed. Further, funding the optimal social welfare subset of projects is desirable when every available project cannot be funded due to budget restrictions. We prove the impossibility of achieving optimal welfare at equilibrium for any monotone refund scheme. We then study different heuristics that the agents can use to contribute to the projects in practice. Through simulations, we demonstrate the heuristics' performance as the average-case trade-off between welfare obtained and agent utility.Comment: To appear in the Proceedings of the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI '23). A preliminary version of this paper titled "Welfare Optimal Combinatorial Civic Crowdfunding with Budgeted Agents" also appeared at GAIW@AAMAS '2

Voluntary 'donations' versus reward-oriented 'contributions': Two experiments on framing in funding mechanisms

In an artefactual field experiment, we implemented a crowdfunding campaign for an institute's summer party and compared donation and contribution framings. We found that the use of the word 'donation' generated higher revenue than the use of 'contribution'. While the individuals receiving the donation framing gave substantially larger amounts, those receiving the contribution framing responded more strongly to reward thresholds and suggestions. An additional survey experiment on MTurk indicated that the term 'donation' triggers more positive emotional responses and that emotions are highly correlated with giving. It appears that making a donation is perceived as a more voluntary act and is thus more successful at generating warm glow than making a contribution. We surmise that this extends to other funding mechanisms

Voluntary 'donations' versus reward-oriented 'contributions': Two experiments on framing in funding mechanisms

In an artefactual field experiment, we implemented a crowdfunding campaign for an institute's summer party and compared donation and contribution framings. We found that the use of the word 'donation' generated higher revenue than the use of 'contribution'. While the individuals receiving the donation framing gave substantially larger amounts, those receiving the contribution framing responded more strongly to reward thresholds and suggestions. An additional survey experiment on MTurk indicated that the term 'donation' triggers more positive emotional responses and that emotions are highly correlated with giving. It appears that making a donation is perceived as a more voluntary act and is thus more successful at generating warm glow than making a contribution. We surmise that this extends to other funding mechanisms

Rebate Rules in Reward-Based Crowdfunding: Introducing the Bid-Cap Rule

We study the efficacy of rebate rules in reward-based crowdfunding, where a project is only realized when a funding goal is met, and only those who pledge at least a reservation price receive a reward from the project. We propose and experimentally test two rebate rules against the customary all-or-nothing model. Firstly, we adapt the proportional rebate rule from threshold public good games to our reward-based setting. Secondly, we develop the novel bid-cap rule. Here, pledges must only be paid up to a cap, which is determined ex-post such that the provision point is exactly met. Theoretically, the bid-cap rule induces weakly less variance in payments compared with the proportional rebate rule. In our experiment, we find that both rebate rules induce higher pledges and increase the project realization rate in comparison to the all-or-nothing model. Further, we can confirm that the variance of payments is lower under the bid-cap rule compared with the proportional rebate rule

Voluntary 'Donations' versus Reward-Oriented 'Contributions': Two Experiments on Framing in Funding Mechanisms

In an artefactual field experiment, we implemented a crowdfunding campaign for an institute's summer party and compared donation and contribution framings. We found that the use of the word 'donation' generated higher revenue than the use of 'contribution'. While the individuals receiving the donation framing gave substantially larger amounts, those receiving the contribution framing responded more strongly to reward thresholds and suggestions. An additional survey experiment on MTurk indicated that the term 'donation' triggers more positive emotional responses and that emotions are highly correlated with giving. It appears that making a donation is perceived as a more voluntary act and is thus more successful at generating warm glow than making a contribution. We surmise that this extends to other funding mechanisms

Early Refund Bonuses Increase Successful Crowdfunding

The assurance contract mechanism is often used to crowdfund public goods. This mechanism has weak implementation properties that can lead to miscoordination and failure to produce socially valuable projects. To encourage early contributions, we extend the assurance contract mechanism with refund bonuses rewarded only to early contributors in the event of fundraising failure. The experimental results show that our proposed solution is very effective in inducing early cooperation and increasing fundraising success. Limiting refund bonuses to early contributors works as well as offering refund bonuses to all potential contributors, while also reducing the amount of bonuses paid. We find that refund bonuses can increase the rate of campaign success by 50% or more. Moreover, we find that even taking into account campaign failures, refund bonuses can be financially self-sustainable suggesting the real world value of extending assurance contracts with refund bonuses