Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Business

Advisor

Yuanfeng Cai

Committee Members

Karl R. Lang

Qiang Gao

Arturo Castellanos

Subject Categories

Management Information Systems

Abstract

Online education crowdfunding attracts public school teachers with its enormous outsourcing opportunities, but its success is constantly challenged by information asymmetry and information overload. To assist the teachers in successfully collecting teaching funds in crowdfunding, three studies are conducted to address the two challenges.

Information asymmetry exists between the fundraising teachers and the potential donors and challenges the education crowdfunding success. Virtual communication setting of online context further exacerbates this issue. Following signaling theory, it is critical for the informed teachers to create and send quality signals to the less-informed donors to enhance communication and establish mutual understanding. To understand effective signals the teachers can leverage to achieve crowdfunding success, we develop two studies. In Study 1, we investigate the effective signals from the informed teacher’s actions and attributes perspectives. Following crowdfunding literature and word of mouth studies, the effects of teacher’s actions, e.g., campaign writing strategies, and attributes, e.g., fundraising experiences, are evaluated. Motivated by the mixed findings regarding the impacts of teacher’s experience signals, a follow-up examination is conducted to investigate remedies, e.g., appreciation acts, that the fundraising teacher can take to establish trust with the donors. In Study 3, we examine the impact of a widely adopted but under-examined promotion strategy of fundraising campaigns, matching gift, on education crowdfunding success. While matching gift from lead donors is anecdotally believed to positively affect the matched campaign’s success following signaling theory, bystander effect studies imply an opposite effect. Study 3 conducts empirical analysis to investigate these issues.

Information overload is a well-recognized obstacle for the donors to solicit funds in online crowdfunding. While it is important for the fundraising teachers to effectively manage the crowdfunding campaign, it is also critical for the donors to identify a crowdfunding project s/he would like to donate to. Scant crowdfunding study has been conducted to address this issue. Motivated by the societal importance of education crowdfunding, Study 2 refers to recommendation studies in e-commerce to fill the research gap. Notably, recommendation study in education crowdfunding needs to accommodate the contextual uniqueness as well as the transient nature of the crowdfunding campaigns, which differ from the relatively long-lasting e-commerce merchandises. In this study, a recommender model is constructed implementing the project-based contextual feature, e.g., school fiscal calendar, as well as the donor-based preference features, e.g., holiday season preference, geo-location preference and pro-social preferences. A follow-up recommendation evaluation is conducted to investigate the varying donation preferences of the donors with different donation experiences.

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