A field experiment on the motivations of crowdfunders

Last registered on January 29, 2020

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Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title

A field experiment on the motivations of crowdfunders

RCT ID

AEARCTR-0004624

Initial registration date

January 28, 2020

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published

January 29, 2020, 1:46 PM EST

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

Country

Germany

Region

Primary Investigator

Name

Christoph Siemroth

Affiliation

University of Essex

Contact Primary Investigator

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Name

Lars Hornuf

PI Affiliation

University of Bremen

Contact Investigator

Additional Trial Information

Status

In development

Start date

2020-02-10

End date

2021-12-31

Keywords

Finance & Microfinance

Additional Keywords

Crowdfunding, Crowdinvesting

JEL code(s)

Secondary IDs

Abstract

We plan to run a field experiment to determine what motivates crowdfunders to support projects on online crowdfunding platforms.

External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation

Hornuf, Lars and Christoph Siemroth. 2020. "A field experiment on the motivations of crowdfunders." AEA RCT Registry. January 29. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.4624-1.1

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Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)

Intervention Start Date

2020-02-10

Intervention End Date

2020-12-31

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)

Click rates from the email newsletter to the project website on the crowdfunding platform

Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Click rates are the share of newsletter subscribers from treatment T that follow the link from the email to the project website. On the individual level, this is a dummy for each subject.

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)

Investment rates (a dummy whether the subject actually invested any amount into the project);
Investment amounts (the amount that was invested into the project)

Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Investment rates and amounts are the shares and average amounts that newsletter subscribers invest in the project on the CFP website. On the individual level, these are dummies and nonnegative investment amounts, respectively.

Experimental Design

Details in the hidden section.

Experimental Design Details

After all email newsletter subscribers (subjects) are assigned to a treatment, and a new project is about to be launched on the CFP, we will prepare 3 different versions of the email newsletter for each of the treatments as described in the intervention section. Every subscriber is then sent his or her version of the newsletter, depending on which treament they have been randomly assigned to. The CFP's email service can track on an individual level which subscribers have clicked on the link to the project website, which is the first of our main outcome variables. The CFP can also track which users on their website invest in the project, which is our second main outcome variable.

We will follow this procedure with three different versions of the email newsletter for the same project for 10 new projects/email newsletters overall. All versions of the newsletter will use the same pictures. Moreover, even though we remove information in some treatments, we will make the length of every version of the newsletter as similar as possible, in order to rule out that the length of the newsletter confounds the treatment effect.

Randomization Method

The computer (more specifically, the email newsletter program that the CFP uses) will randomly allocate 1/3 of the subscribers to the baseline treatment, 1/3 of subscribers will be assigned to the eco treatment, and another 1/3 of the subscribers will be assigned to the financial treatment. Treatment status is reassigned for every project.

Randomization Unit

Randomization will be done on an individual (newsletter subscriber) level.

Was the treatment clustered?

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters

The latest information given to us from the crowdfunding platform is that between 6000 and 7000 people are subscribed to the email newsletter. Whatever the exact number at the start of each project, all of them will participate in the field experiment. This means that there may be slightly more or less subjects for different projects (due to attrition in the subscriber base, or new sign-ups, over time).

Sample size: planned number of observations

Since the experiment is not clustered, it is the same as the number of clusters (see above).

Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms

Sample size per treatment is a third of the total sample size (see above), since we have 3 treatments described above and plan to have equal numbers of subjects per treatment.

Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)

Supporting Documents and Materials

IRB