Secret Admirers: An Empirical Examination of Information Hiding and Contribution Dynamics in Online Crowdfunding
作者利用全球最大众筹平台之一的独特印象级数据，研究了在线众筹中贡献者隐藏信息（如用户名或金额）对后续访问者行为的影响。数据涵盖每次交易中贡献者是否选择隐藏信息。作者发现，当贡献者选择隐藏信息时，会显著降低后续访问者的转化率（即捐款概率），以及转化后的平均捐款金额。此外，作者还论证了社会规范是信息隐藏的重要驱动因素，即观察到他人隐藏信息会促使自己效仿。研究对在线信息隐藏机制的设计以及众筹平台和电子市场的优化具有启示。
Individuals’ actions in online social contexts are growing increasingly visible and traceable. Many online platforms account for this by providing users with granular control over when and how their identity or actions are made visible to peers. However, little work has sought to understand the effect that a user’s decision to conceal information might have on observing peers, who are likely to refer to that information when deciding on their own actions. We leverage a unique impression-level data set from one of the world’s largest online crowdfunding platforms, where contributors are given the option to conceal their username or contribution amount from public display, with each transaction. We demonstrate that when campaign contributors elect to conceal information, it has a negative influence on subsequent visitors’ likelihood of conversion, as well as on their average contributions, conditional on conversion. Moreover, we argue that social norms are an important driver of information concealment, providing evidence of peer influence in the decision to conceal. We discuss the implications of our results for the provision of online information hiding mechanisms, as well as the design of crowdfunding platforms and electronic markets more generally.