Analyzing Crowdfunding of Public Projects Under Dynamic Beliefs

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Damle, Sankarshan, Gujar, Sujit
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Damle, Sankarshan
Gujar, Sujit
author_facet Damle, Sankarshan
Gujar, Sujit
contents In the last decade, social planners have used crowdfunding to raise funds for public projects. As these public projects are non-excludable, the beneficiaries may free-ride. Thus, there is a need to design incentive mechanisms for such strategic agents to contribute to the project. The existing mechanisms, like PPR or PPRx, assume that the agent's beliefs about the project getting funded do not change over time, i.e., their beliefs are static. Researchers highlight that unless appropriately incentivized, the agents defer their contributions in static settings, leading to a ``race'' to contribute at the deadline. In this work, we model the evolution of agents' beliefs as a random walk. We study PPRx -- an existing mechanism for the static belief setting -- in this dynamic belief setting and refer to it as PPRx-DB for readability. We prove that in PPRx-DB, the project is funded at equilibrium. More significantly, we prove that under certain conditions on agent's belief evolution, agents will contribute as soon as they arrive at the mechanism. Thus, we believe that by incorporating dynamic belief evolution in analysis, the social planner can mitigate the concern of race conditions in many mechanisms.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_00454
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Analyzing Crowdfunding of Public Projects Under Dynamic Beliefs
Damle, Sankarshan
Gujar, Sujit
Computer Science and Game Theory
In the last decade, social planners have used crowdfunding to raise funds for public projects. As these public projects are non-excludable, the beneficiaries may free-ride. Thus, there is a need to design incentive mechanisms for such strategic agents to contribute to the project. The existing mechanisms, like PPR or PPRx, assume that the agent's beliefs about the project getting funded do not change over time, i.e., their beliefs are static. Researchers highlight that unless appropriately incentivized, the agents defer their contributions in static settings, leading to a ``race'' to contribute at the deadline. In this work, we model the evolution of agents' beliefs as a random walk. We study PPRx -- an existing mechanism for the static belief setting -- in this dynamic belief setting and refer to it as PPRx-DB for readability. We prove that in PPRx-DB, the project is funded at equilibrium. More significantly, we prove that under certain conditions on agent's belief evolution, agents will contribute as soon as they arrive at the mechanism. Thus, we believe that by incorporating dynamic belief evolution in analysis, the social planner can mitigate the concern of race conditions in many mechanisms.
title Analyzing Crowdfunding of Public Projects Under Dynamic Beliefs
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.00454