Enhancing Campaign Design in Crowdfunding: A Product Supply Optimization Perspective

Enhancing Campaign Design in Crowdfunding: A Product Supply Optimization Perspective

Qi Liu, Guifeng Wang, Hongke Zhao, Chuanren Liu, Tong Xu, Enhong Chen

Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 695-702. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2017/97

Crowdfunding is an emerging Internet application for creators designing campaigns (projects) to collect funds from public investors. Usually, the limited budget of the creator is manually divided into several perks (reward options), that should fit various market demand and further bring different monetary contributions for the campaign. Therefore, it is very challenging for each creator to design an effective campaign. To this end, in this paper, we aim to enhance the funding performance of the newly proposed campaigns, with a focus on optimizing the product supply of perks. Specifically, given the expected budget and the perks of a campaign, we propose a novel solution to automatically recommend the optimal product supply to every perk for balancing the expected return of this campaign against the risk. Along this line, we define it as a constrained portfolio selection problem, where the risk of each campaign is measured by a multi-task learning method. Finally, experimental results on the real-world crowdfunding data clearly prove that the optimized product supply can help improve the campaign performance significantly, and meanwhile, our multi-task learning method could more precisely estimate the risk of each campaign.
Keywords:
Constraints and Satisfiability: Applications
Machine Learning: Data Mining