Promoting crowdfunding with lottery: The impact on campaign performance

In recent years, some leading crowdfunding platforms initiated a new promotion instrument, the lottery option, to fundraisers. To gain insights into whether it is a wise decision or a harmful choice to promote crowdfunding campaigns with the lottery, we explore its impacts on crowdfunding performance using a unique dataset collected from Zhongchou.com. Based on our proposed multidimensional evaluation framework, we find that the lottery option is beneficial to the participation performance of crowdfunding campaigns. However, its impacts on the fundraising performance of crowdfunding campaigns are sophisticated. Furthermore, it has a cannibalization effect on the potential backers’ selection of existing types of options.