Essays on Crowdfunding: Exploring the Funding and Post-funding Phases and Outcomes

In the recent years, crowdfunding (a phenomenon where individuals collectively contribute money to back different goals and projects through the internet) has been gaining a lot of attention especially for its socio-economic impact. This dissertation explores this phenomenon in three distinct but related essays. The first essay explores the nature and dynamics of backers’ contributions and uses the insights generated to develop a forecasting model that can predict crowdfunding campaign outcomes. The second essay investigates how creators’ crowdfunding campaign design decisions impact their funding and post-funding outcomes. Interestingly, the essay highlights that certain crowdfunding campaign design decisions have differential effects on both funding and post-funding phases and this has implications for creators, backers, and crowdfunding platform owners. Finally, the third essay investigates whether creators’ post-funding relations-building efforts with backers matter and how such relations-building efforts might impact the performance of their subsequent crowdfunding campaign. In general, this dissertation not only increases our understanding of the crowdfunding phenomenon across the funding and post-funding phases, it also provides insights and tools that can help stakeholders maximize the benefits accruable to them when they engage in crowdfunding