管理科学与工程前沿讲座（30）— Guangzhi Shang

时间：2025-03-04

管理科学与工程前沿讲座（30）— Guangzhi Shang 

报告人：Guangzhi Shang 教授

报告题目：Budget Disclosure in Crowdfunding: Information Asymmetry and Cost Transparency

报告时间：2025年3月11日（周二）上午11:00- 12:00

报告地点：腾讯会议 （ Meeting ID: 776-362-762）

主办单位：管理科学与工程学院     

现代供应链管理研究院

辽宁省大数据管理与优化决策重点实验室

          辽宁省大数据管理决策研究生创新与学术交流中心

【报告摘要】

This paper investigates how a crowdfunding campaign’s voluntary disclosure of the sensitive cost information affects its funding performance in a hybrid award-donation setting. Instead of enhancing a campaign’s marketing traits, project budget as a novel information provision tool reminds the crowd the behind-the-scenes operations for developing and executing a project. This resembles the radical practice of cost transparency recently observed in the retail industry and studied experimentally in the literature. We also examine how the disclosure effect is heterogenous across the campaign creator’s gender and the structure of the cost items (fixed versus variable costs). Methodology/results: Our data collection follows Kickstarter’s rollout of the Project Budget tool in 2019. We pre-process our project-level raw data via coarsened exact matching to construct a treatment sample (projects with budget) and a control sample (those without budget). Because of the voluntary nature of budget provision, we address the resulting endogeneity issue using the endogenous treatment effect model and peer average–style instruments. Budget provision on average increases funding performance by over 100%, which is more effective than many information provision tools studied in the literature. Female creators enjoy a 20%-30% higher benefit than male creators. A higher fixed cost (over total cost) ratio, which is indicative of a higher profit margin, significantly reduces the benefit but does not make disclosure backfire. Interestingly, donation amount and pure donors both increase with budget provision. Managerial implications: Showing the costs to customers can be highly effective in business settings where trust between stakeholders is critical, which implies a promising generalization to donation-based crowdfunding. Our results can also be used to guide a sequential rollout of the Project Budget feature across campaign categories and promote adoption rates.

【报告人简介】

Guangzhi Shang是佛罗里达州立大学（Florida State University）商业分析、信息系统和供应链系的Jim Moran运营管理副教授。他的研究成果已发表在Production and Operations Management、Journal of Operations Management、Management Information Systems Quarterly和Decision Sciences等期刊上，并获得了POM、JOM以及POM学会卓越运营卓越学院的最佳论文奖项的认可。他担任JOM期刊的实证研究方法部门和DS期刊的零售运营部门的部门编辑。他的审阅服务被认可为2019年DS杰出审阅员奖和2018年JOM最佳审阅员奖的获得者。他还被提名为POM最佳审阅员和JOM最佳副编辑。他与Mike Galbreth和Mark Ferguson合作在Reverse Logistics Magazine中制作专栏，名为“学界观点”，旨在将最新学术知识传播给处理消费者退货的行业专业人员。

Guangzhi Shang目前的研究主题有三个：消费者退货管理、服务劳工问题以及创新技术管理。他从多个角度研究第一个主题，包括零售商如何制定最佳的退货政策、原始设备制造商或零售商如何更好地预测退货数量，以及零售商如何评估其退货政策的价值。对于第二个主题，他侧重于在线聊天联系中心的情境。研究问题包括顾客等待体验对聊天会话进展的影响，代理人从他们过去经验中学习的能力，以及顾客与代理人匹配问题。对于第三个主题，他研究新兴的金融科技，如加密货币和众筹平台。他热衷于进行实践驱动的研究。

 撰稿： 赵永丽 朱晗     审核：吴志樵  许建军   

单位：管理科学与工程学院  现代供应链管理研究院