Date of Award:

5-2016

Document Type:

Thesis

Degree Name:

Master of Science (MS)

Department:

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Committee Chair(s)

Kyumin Lee

Committee

Kyumin Lee

Committee

Nicholas Flann

Committee

Haitao Wang

Abstract

Online crowdfunding platforms provide project creators with new opportunities for seeking funds from people in the world. But reaching a fund-raising goal or making a project successful is always a challenge. Besides, little is known about post-campaign activities of project creators and backers. To fill the gap, in this research, we are interested in understanding (i) the characteristics of successful projects, (ii) how project creators reacted when their projects failed, and (iii) what post-campaign activities creators and backers made. To achieve our research objectives, first, we analyzed successful projects and failed projects on Kickstarter, the most popular crowdfunding platform. Then we clustered successful projects by their evolutionary patterns in terms of pledged money toward understanding what efforts project creators should make in order to make a project successful and get more pledged money. We also analyzed what activities project creators and backers made during a post-campaign period by building topic models from comments associated with the projects.

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