Intervention (Hidden)
Background
We plan to run a field experiment on a European crowdfunding platform (whose name we agreed to keep anonymous; the name is given confidentially to this registry). This crowdfunding platform (henceforth CFP) sends out email newsletters to its users whenever a new project (which seeks funding) is launched on their website. The email newsletter briefly describes the project in terms of ecological benefits (e.g., reduction in CO2 emissions) and financial information (e.g., funding amount sought, duration, interest rate from investing). For example, a project might ask for funding to put solar panels on a school roof for power generation, and the ecological benefit is that "dirtier" methods of power generation are replaced with PV panels. Sometimes a project has a social rather than an ecological benefit. The email newsletter also includes links to the project on the CFP’s website, where users can see more details about the project and can actually make an investment if interested.
Research question
We want to find out what motivates people to invest on such platforms. In particular, we want to find out whether social and ecological benefits from funding a project are important to investors, besides the financial return and risk which would be the obvious motivation.
Field experiment
To answer this question, we agreed with the crowdfunding platform to run a field experiment. All users who already signed up to the newsletter will be randomly allocated to one of three treatments:
1. Baseline: They receive the newsletter as before (with information on financials and ecological benefits)
2. Eco: They receive a newsletter where only social and ecological information about the project is given, but no information about the financials.
3. Financial: They receive a newsletter where only information about the financials of the project is given, but no information about the social or ecological benefits.
The random allocation to treatment will be done anew for every new project/newsletter, hence we have within-subject variation in treatment exposure.
The crowdfunding platform then tracks whether the users are interested in the new project; more specifically, the platform can track whether a user clicked on the link to the project/platform website. This is our main outcome variable: Whether users are interested in the project and click on the link with more information and the possibility to invest. Another outcome variable is whether users later actually invested in the project; however, we expect there to be less of an effect as investments are only possible via the CFP's project website, which gives the same information in all treatments (unlike the email newsletter which varies information between treatments).
The crowdfunding platform agreed to run this experiment for 10 new projects, i.e., 10 email newsletters. Since it is uncertain when new projects will seek funding on the platform, we cannot give a definitive start or end date, but we do fix the duration as lasting for 10 projects. We plan to have finished all paperwork by February 2020, and if this is the case, then the intervention/experiment will commence with the first project.