Crowdfunding With Strategic Online Information Disclosure

How should crowdfunding creators strategically reveal campaign progress to maximize funding success? While existing platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo disclose pledging information immediately after each contribution, we show that this widespread practice can be far from optimal. This work addresses revenue maximization for project creators through joint optimization of information disclosure and pricing strategies under stochastic contributor arrivals. Despite the challenge of real-time decision-making with intertwined strategies, we decompose the problem into two key analytical steps. First, we establish the optimality of maintaining a constant price between consecutive information disclosures. Second, we prove that the creator's optimal disclosure strategy reduces to deciding solely whether to reveal information immediately following each contributor's arrival. When the prior belief indicating high valuation contributor probability is sufficiently high, our proposed mechanism achieves asymptotic performance identical to that of the optimal full-information benchmark. Numerical results demonstrate that our mechanism significantly outperforms prevalent information disclosure policies used by platforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, yielding average revenue gains of 150%.