What are the barriers to platforms offering the option? I suspect there’s limited value in artificial experiments—the interaction of different motivations and estimates of success for real projects and real funders is likely to be too varied to control for.
Naively, it would seem cheap for a platform to offer it to fund-seekers, and running code trumps all of our theoretical arguments.
I honestly don’t see any barriers. Either they simply don’t know about it, or maybe they think that feature is too complex or somehow not worth it, or they have reasons I haven’t thought of. If anyone knows I expect it would be Alex Tabarrok, cause any company interested in that would have likely contacted him. Otherwise, it might be a good idea to contact crowdfunding platforms and ask them about it.
[Edit 30/aug/2023]: The barrier is probably legal. Offering a refund bonus is like offering a security, so it would be subject to equity crowdfunding regulations (probably, I’m not a lawyer).
What are the barriers to platforms offering the option? I suspect there’s limited value in artificial experiments—the interaction of different motivations and estimates of success for real projects and real funders is likely to be too varied to control for.
Naively, it would seem cheap for a platform to offer it to fund-seekers, and running code trumps all of our theoretical arguments.
I honestly don’t see any barriers. Either they simply don’t know about it, or maybe they think that feature is too complex or somehow not worth it, or they have reasons I haven’t thought of. If anyone knows I expect it would be Alex Tabarrok, cause any company interested in that would have likely contacted him. Otherwise, it might be a good idea to contact crowdfunding platforms and ask them about it.
[Edit 30/aug/2023]: The barrier is probably legal. Offering a refund bonus is like offering a security, so it would be subject to equity crowdfunding regulations (probably, I’m not a lawyer).