In this dissertation, we approach three unique strands of the crowdfunding literature. In the first chapter, we develop a theoretical model evaluating the entrepreneur’s optimal financing and launching choice when choosing between reward-based crowdfunding and debt financing. Contrary to previous literature, we show that when using reward-based crowdfunding, the entrepreneur’s optimal pricing strategy involves committing to the future retail price during the crowdfunding campaign and that this unique optimal strategy involves rewarding backers with a discount relative to future retail customers. When choosing between debt financing and reward-based crowdfunding, we show that there is no unique optimal strategy. The optimal strategy would depend on the project capital requirements and the prevailing interest rate. We find that projects with lower capital requirement will prefer to launch via crowdfunding since they do not need to diverge away from the optimal crowdfunding prices. Whereas for higher capital requirements, the optimal strategy depends on the interest rate levels. In the second chapter, we diverge from the classical analysis of non-financial motives in reward-based crowdfunding and investigate how entrepreneurs can financially incentivize backers in order to improve campaign performance. We specifically show how the entrepreneur’s pricing strategy can be used to signal the project’s quality and the financial reward that backers receive relative to retail customers. Our study involves the analysis of two costly signals, price commitment and discount, and a costless signal, the number of reward classes. Our results show that the use of price commitment and discount by the entrepreneur is positively associated with the campaign performance. The number of reward classes exhibits a similar relationship with crowdfunding performance. However, we highlight that signals do not work in isolation and that in the presence of the costly signals, the effect of the costless signal is weakened. This provides additional support for the argument that when costly and costless signals interact, backers prioritize the former. The third chapter of this thesis extends the nascent literature on serial crowdfunding by accounting for the previously neglected contextual dimension of campaigns on the platform. We investigate the effects of changing contexts (industry and/or geographic location) on the campaign performance. We hypothesize that changing context will adversely affect the campaign outcome as some of the acquired knowledge from previous campaigns is context-specific. Moreover, we posit that entrepreneurs with higher level of crowdfunding experience are better able to make generalizations from previous experience and apply them to different contexts such that they suffer less from changing contexts. An empirical analysis of the universe of serial crowdfunders on Kickstarter provides support for our hypotheses. We additionally show that changing context following failure adds a layer of complexity which intensifies the negative relationship between changing context and campaign outcome.
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