Profit allocation in investment-based crowdfunding with investors of dynamic entry times

Abstract

Even distribution is a normal profit allocation mechanism for investment-based crowdfunding projects on many platforms. In other words, the investors with the same pledging funds will be paid evenly when the investment ends. The even allocation mechanism works well under the assumption that the investors arrive at the platform simultaneously. However, in practice, the investors are sequential, therefore, the stories are different when considering the dynamic entry times of the investors. In this paper, we study ways to design appropriate profit allocation mechanisms to enhance the success rate of an investment-based crowdfunding project. The basic model focuses on the two-investor case, where only two investors with dynamic entry times are considered. The profit allocation mechanism is shown to have great impacts on the pledging probabilities of investors, as well as the success rate of a project. After that, we shift our focus to the two-cohort case, where dynamic investors are assumed to arrive at the platform as two sequential cohorts. By taking the sizes of each cohort into consideration, we are able to analyze the success rate of a project under various practical situations. Finally, we implement some numerical experiments to generalize our studies to the situations where (i) there are more than two pledging periods for the investors, (ii) the herding effect of the investors is considered, and (iii) the valuations of the investors are assumed to be normally distributed. Our main results still hold under these general situations.