Crowdfunding Conservation (and Other Public Goods)

Abstract

Crowdfunding has become an increasingly popular means to fund the provision of public goods and especially of nature conservation projects. We implement a lab-in-the-field experiment by setting up a web-based user interface, very similar to actual crowdfunding platforms, to test whether coordination mechanisms, like seed money and decoy projects, can increase the effectiveness of crowdfunding campaigns if multiple public goods projects are eligible for funding. We find some of our treatments to affect coordination especially via early contributions, but not always in an intuitive way. Our results are confirmed in a follow-up experiment with actual nature conservation projects.