Aravinda Garimella | University of Washington (original) (raw)

Papers by Aravinda Garimella

International Conference on Information Systems, 2017

Recently, the phenomenon of crowdfunding has surfaced as an innovative way to raise capital for v... more Recently, the phenomenon of crowdfunding has surfaced as an innovative way to raise capital for venture opportunities online. Using data from a unique crowdfunding platform, we examine whether opting for “prefunding”, or raising awareness prior to fund-raising, increases the likelihood of a campaign meeting its fund-raising goal. We also examine how prefunding activities influence fundraising dynamics to show that prefunding activities significantly increase the likelihood of a campaign meeting its fund-raising goal, and that the relationship between prefunding and project success is mediated by the number of backers and quality of backers. We take an in-depth look at projects that use prefunding and find that it is effective when entrepreneurs keep potential backers informed and ensure that they are engaged

Social Science Research Network, 2020

We study how digital crowdfunding platforms can help replenish the sudden economic deficiencies t... more We study how digital crowdfunding platforms can help replenish the sudden economic deficiencies that accompany a global crisis. Specifically, we examine whether public schools, which suffered severe setbacks during the COVID-19 crisis, were able to generate support from online fundraising communities. We study how the shutdown of schools and the shift to online learning in the United States affected private fundraising on the DonorsChoose.org platform. We find evidence that, after the exogenous shock caused by the pandemic (and resulting stay-at-home orders), donations to schools increased, implying both demand-side and supply-side effects. We observe an increased level of concern from existing platform contributors through increased per-donor contributions, especially toward high-need schools. Moreover, we found a shift in donation patterns, wherein donors swiftly adapted to renewed priorities and redistributed their resources to immediate needs around digital learning infrastructure. Our findings reveal the pivotal role digital platforms can play in facilitating community resilience during times of crisis.

In my dissertation, I study user engagement on online collaborative communities. I explore user i... more In my dissertation, I study user engagement on online collaborative communities. I explore user interactions in two contexts, Crowdfunding (Collaborative funding) and Massive Open Online Courses (Collaborative learning) platforms. In the context of collaborative fundraising, using data from JD.com, China's leading crowdfunding platform, I study entrepreneurial activities before and after the launch of crowdfunding campaigns and how these activities affect the likelihood of campaign success. Specifically, I study the effect of raising awareness prior to the launch of a campaign on the likelihood of a campaign meetings its goal. In the context of collaborative learning, I student engagement on MOOCs, an outcome of utmost interest to practitioners. Using a rich data set of daily student interactions over a period of forty months on Khan Academy, a pioneer MOOC platform in the K-12 space and text mining techniques, I study the effect of the display of empathy by students on the level of conversation on the platform. i

Free sampling, which has been widely applied and studied in marketing, has recently been adopted ... more Free sampling, which has been widely applied and studied in marketing, has recently been adopted by entrepreneurs on crowdfunding platforms. Using a dataset from a unique crowdfunding platform, we study whether opting to provide free samples to potential backers increases the likelihood of a campaign meeting its goal. We also investigate how free sampling influences the fundraising dynamics. Using a matched sample of crowdfunding campaigns, we demonstrate that providing free samples significantly improves crowdfunding performance. And among those projects which opt for free sampling, persuasion effect during the report period contributes to the positive effect. The higher the score from the evaluator, the more successful the campaign will be. We also find that the longer the investors are exposed to the evaluation report, the more money is raised.

Social Science Research Network, 2017

In an increasingly competitive crowdfunding market, entrepreneurs are seeking out new ways to imp... more In an increasingly competitive crowdfunding market, entrepreneurs are seeking out new ways to improve their likelihood of success. This is one of the reasons for the emergence of prefunding platforms, which help entrepreneurs to raise awareness of their forthcoming fund-raising projects. Using data from an online crowdfunding platform, we show that opting for prefunding prior to fund-raising significantly increases the likelihood of a campaign meeting its fund-raising goal. We also find that prefunding projects transition to the fund-raising stage with a higher number of backers, and a higher contribution size on the first day of funding when compared to non-prefunding projects. This strong head-start on the first day of solicitation then enhances a project's ability to garner funds over the fund-raising window, thus increasing the likelihood of eventual success. Moreover, when entrepreneurs proactively update information about their projects and actively engage with followers during the prefunding period, their campaigns are more likely to launch with a higher number of backers and higher contribution size. Our study has important implications for both entrepreneurs and crowdfunding platforms.

SSRN Electronic Journal

Over the last two decades, grassroots altruism, enabled through online platforms such as DonorsCh... more Over the last two decades, grassroots altruism, enabled through online platforms such as DonorsChoose.org, has resulted in the successful funding of numerous essential public school projects across the country. While such channels become critical fundraising mechanisms, there is an unintended possibility of the crowding out of these sources by governmental initiatives that aim to address public school welfare and quality of education. In this study, with a focus on major public policy announcements, we examine whether there is an unintended effect of external measures, such as the signing of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), on grassroots altruism, as observed on online philanthropy platforms. We surmise that, in such platforms, donors could become complacent and take comfort in the cognizance of an external agency addressing the problems they care about — we term this the “savior effect”. Importantly, from our analysis of panel data on an education crowdfunding platform, we find (a) a decline in donations toward public school projects on the platform, and (b) that donations become more local, disproportionately impacting schools with high concentrations of low-income and minority students, which receive fewer instructional resources to begin with. Our work has important policy implications for public schools, donor communities, and online fundraising platforms.

Academy of Management Proceedings

Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2021

The growing consensus that human intelligence and artificial intelligence are complementary has l... more The growing consensus that human intelligence and artificial intelligence are complementary has led to Human-AI hybrid systems. As digital platforms incorporating human-AI hybrids, platform designers need to evaluate the influence of AI on human judgment, and how such hybrid systems perform. In this paper, we investigate: Are human decisions influenced by AI agents in high uncertainty environments, such as evaluating ICO projects? Under what situations are humans able to mitigate AI agents-induced errors? Our results suggest that in general, humans are influenced by AI agents. Humans tend to use AI as a filter to rule out low quality projects, while a high AI rating triggers human expert to apply their own judgment.

Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2021

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2020

We study how digital crowdfunding platforms can help replenish the sudden economic deficiencies t... more We study how digital crowdfunding platforms can help replenish the sudden economic deficiencies that accompany a global crisis. Specifically, we examine whether public schools, which suffered severe setbacks during the COVID-19 crisis, were able to generate support from online fundraising communities. We study how the shutdown of schools and the shift to online learning in the United States affected private fundraising on the DonorsChoose.org platform. We find evidence that, after the exogenous shock caused by the pandemic (and resulting stay-at-home orders), donations to schools increased, implying both demand-side and supply-side effects. We observe an increased level of concern from existing platform contributors through increased per-donor contributions, especially toward high-need schools. Moreover, we found a shift in donation patterns, wherein donors swiftly adapted to renewed priorities and redistributed their resources to immediate needs around digital learning infrastructure. Our findings reveal the pivotal role digital platforms can play in facilitating community resilience during times of crisis.

Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2022

Essays on User Engagement in Online Collaborative Communities

Recently, the phenomenon of crowdfunding has surfaced as an innovative way to raise capital for v... more Recently, the phenomenon of crowdfunding has surfaced as an innovative way to raise capital for venture opportunities online. Using data from a unique crowdfunding platform, we examine whether opting for “prefunding”, or raising awareness prior to fund-raising, increases the likelihood of a campaign meeting its fund-raising goal. We also examine how prefunding activities influence fundraising dynamics to show that prefunding activities significantly increase the likelihood of a campaign meeting its fund-raising goal, and that the relationship between prefunding and project success is mediated by the number of backers and quality of backers. We take an in-depth look at projects that use prefunding and find that it is effective when entrepreneurs keep potential backers informed and ensure that they are engaged

Other Financial Economics eJournal, 2020

The growing consensus that human intelligence and artificial intelligence (AI) are complementary ... more The growing consensus that human intelligence and artificial intelligence (AI) are complementary has led to the emergence of AI-augmented systems. In this paper, we investigate whether AI agents influence human decisions in the high-risk environments of initial coin offering (ICO) where most ICO fail. Using panel data from a leading ICO evaluation platform that uses AI to augment human experts, we examine how humans integrate the assessments of AI agents into their assessments when real outcomes are at stake. Our results show that AI agents exert an asymmetric influence on human decisions. When the AI agent rates an ICO low, the decisions of human experts follow it. When the AI agent rates an ICO high, the decisions of human experts deviate from it. Thus, we conclude that human experts use the AI agent’s low score to screen out ICOs and use the agent’s high score as a trigger to investigate an ICO more deeply and come to their own conclusions about its potential. The same human expe...

Free sampling, which has been widely applied and studied in marketing, has recently been adopted ... more Free sampling, which has been widely applied and studied in marketing, has recently been adopted by entrepreneurs on crowdfunding platforms. Using a dataset from a unique crowdfunding platform, we study whether opting to provide free samples to potential backers increases the likelihood of a campaign meeting its goal. We also investigate how free sampling influences the fundraising dynamics. Using a matched sample of crowdfunding campaigns, we demonstrate that providing free samples significantly improves crowdfunding performance. And among those projects which opt for free sampling, persuasion effect during the report period contributes to the positive effect. The higher the score from the evaluator, the more successful the campaign will be. We also find that the longer the investors are exposed to the evaluation report, the more money is raised.

As artificial intelligence is increasingly used in assisting and augmenting different tasks, it i... more As artificial intelligence is increasingly used in assisting and augmenting different tasks, it is now imperative to understand how A.I. influences human decision making. Using data collected from a leading ICO evaluation platform, we empirically investigate whether and how human domain experts’ judgments are influenced by A.I. bots. Our preliminary results suggest that experts are consistently influenced by artificial intelligence regardless of whether the project is successful or not, and whether the A.I. bot’s evaluation was correct or wrong. Our results also indicate that going through a Pre-ICO stage reduces information asymmetry and therefore mitigates the influence of A.I. on experts. This paper contributes to the nascent literature in the areas of human-A.I. interaction, A.I.-facilitated decision making and A.I.-induced biases

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2017

In an increasingly competitive crowdfunding market, entrepreneurs are seeking out new ways to imp... more In an increasingly competitive crowdfunding market, entrepreneurs are seeking out new ways to improve their likelihood of success. This is one of the reasons for the emergence of prefunding platforms, which help entrepreneurs to raise awareness of their forthcoming fund-raising projects. Using data from an online crowdfunding platform, we show that opting for prefunding prior to fund-raising significantly increases the likelihood of a campaign meeting its fund-raising goal. We also find that prefunding projects transition to the fund-raising stage with a higher number of backers, and a higher contribution size on the first day of funding when compared to non-prefunding projects. This strong head-start on the first day of solicitation then enhances a project's ability to garner funds over the fund-raising window, thus increasing the likelihood of eventual success. Moreover, when entrepreneurs proactively update information about their projects and actively engage with followers during the prefunding period, their campaigns are more likely to launch with a higher number of backers and higher contribution size. Our study has important implications for both entrepreneurs and crowdfunding platforms.

International Conference on Information Systems, 2017

Recently, the phenomenon of crowdfunding has surfaced as an innovative way to raise capital for v... more Recently, the phenomenon of crowdfunding has surfaced as an innovative way to raise capital for venture opportunities online. Using data from a unique crowdfunding platform, we examine whether opting for “prefunding”, or raising awareness prior to fund-raising, increases the likelihood of a campaign meeting its fund-raising goal. We also examine how prefunding activities influence fundraising dynamics to show that prefunding activities significantly increase the likelihood of a campaign meeting its fund-raising goal, and that the relationship between prefunding and project success is mediated by the number of backers and quality of backers. We take an in-depth look at projects that use prefunding and find that it is effective when entrepreneurs keep potential backers informed and ensure that they are engaged

Social Science Research Network, 2020

We study how digital crowdfunding platforms can help replenish the sudden economic deficiencies t... more We study how digital crowdfunding platforms can help replenish the sudden economic deficiencies that accompany a global crisis. Specifically, we examine whether public schools, which suffered severe setbacks during the COVID-19 crisis, were able to generate support from online fundraising communities. We study how the shutdown of schools and the shift to online learning in the United States affected private fundraising on the DonorsChoose.org platform. We find evidence that, after the exogenous shock caused by the pandemic (and resulting stay-at-home orders), donations to schools increased, implying both demand-side and supply-side effects. We observe an increased level of concern from existing platform contributors through increased per-donor contributions, especially toward high-need schools. Moreover, we found a shift in donation patterns, wherein donors swiftly adapted to renewed priorities and redistributed their resources to immediate needs around digital learning infrastructure. Our findings reveal the pivotal role digital platforms can play in facilitating community resilience during times of crisis.

In my dissertation, I study user engagement on online collaborative communities. I explore user i... more In my dissertation, I study user engagement on online collaborative communities. I explore user interactions in two contexts, Crowdfunding (Collaborative funding) and Massive Open Online Courses (Collaborative learning) platforms. In the context of collaborative fundraising, using data from JD.com, China's leading crowdfunding platform, I study entrepreneurial activities before and after the launch of crowdfunding campaigns and how these activities affect the likelihood of campaign success. Specifically, I study the effect of raising awareness prior to the launch of a campaign on the likelihood of a campaign meetings its goal. In the context of collaborative learning, I student engagement on MOOCs, an outcome of utmost interest to practitioners. Using a rich data set of daily student interactions over a period of forty months on Khan Academy, a pioneer MOOC platform in the K-12 space and text mining techniques, I study the effect of the display of empathy by students on the level of conversation on the platform. i

Free sampling, which has been widely applied and studied in marketing, has recently been adopted ... more Free sampling, which has been widely applied and studied in marketing, has recently been adopted by entrepreneurs on crowdfunding platforms. Using a dataset from a unique crowdfunding platform, we study whether opting to provide free samples to potential backers increases the likelihood of a campaign meeting its goal. We also investigate how free sampling influences the fundraising dynamics. Using a matched sample of crowdfunding campaigns, we demonstrate that providing free samples significantly improves crowdfunding performance. And among those projects which opt for free sampling, persuasion effect during the report period contributes to the positive effect. The higher the score from the evaluator, the more successful the campaign will be. We also find that the longer the investors are exposed to the evaluation report, the more money is raised.

Social Science Research Network, 2017

In an increasingly competitive crowdfunding market, entrepreneurs are seeking out new ways to imp... more In an increasingly competitive crowdfunding market, entrepreneurs are seeking out new ways to improve their likelihood of success. This is one of the reasons for the emergence of prefunding platforms, which help entrepreneurs to raise awareness of their forthcoming fund-raising projects. Using data from an online crowdfunding platform, we show that opting for prefunding prior to fund-raising significantly increases the likelihood of a campaign meeting its fund-raising goal. We also find that prefunding projects transition to the fund-raising stage with a higher number of backers, and a higher contribution size on the first day of funding when compared to non-prefunding projects. This strong head-start on the first day of solicitation then enhances a project's ability to garner funds over the fund-raising window, thus increasing the likelihood of eventual success. Moreover, when entrepreneurs proactively update information about their projects and actively engage with followers during the prefunding period, their campaigns are more likely to launch with a higher number of backers and higher contribution size. Our study has important implications for both entrepreneurs and crowdfunding platforms.

SSRN Electronic Journal

Over the last two decades, grassroots altruism, enabled through online platforms such as DonorsCh... more Over the last two decades, grassroots altruism, enabled through online platforms such as DonorsChoose.org, has resulted in the successful funding of numerous essential public school projects across the country. While such channels become critical fundraising mechanisms, there is an unintended possibility of the crowding out of these sources by governmental initiatives that aim to address public school welfare and quality of education. In this study, with a focus on major public policy announcements, we examine whether there is an unintended effect of external measures, such as the signing of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), on grassroots altruism, as observed on online philanthropy platforms. We surmise that, in such platforms, donors could become complacent and take comfort in the cognizance of an external agency addressing the problems they care about — we term this the “savior effect”. Importantly, from our analysis of panel data on an education crowdfunding platform, we find (a) a decline in donations toward public school projects on the platform, and (b) that donations become more local, disproportionately impacting schools with high concentrations of low-income and minority students, which receive fewer instructional resources to begin with. Our work has important policy implications for public schools, donor communities, and online fundraising platforms.

Academy of Management Proceedings

Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2021

The growing consensus that human intelligence and artificial intelligence are complementary has l... more The growing consensus that human intelligence and artificial intelligence are complementary has led to Human-AI hybrid systems. As digital platforms incorporating human-AI hybrids, platform designers need to evaluate the influence of AI on human judgment, and how such hybrid systems perform. In this paper, we investigate: Are human decisions influenced by AI agents in high uncertainty environments, such as evaluating ICO projects? Under what situations are humans able to mitigate AI agents-induced errors? Our results suggest that in general, humans are influenced by AI agents. Humans tend to use AI as a filter to rule out low quality projects, while a high AI rating triggers human expert to apply their own judgment.

Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2021

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2020

We study how digital crowdfunding platforms can help replenish the sudden economic deficiencies t... more We study how digital crowdfunding platforms can help replenish the sudden economic deficiencies that accompany a global crisis. Specifically, we examine whether public schools, which suffered severe setbacks during the COVID-19 crisis, were able to generate support from online fundraising communities. We study how the shutdown of schools and the shift to online learning in the United States affected private fundraising on the DonorsChoose.org platform. We find evidence that, after the exogenous shock caused by the pandemic (and resulting stay-at-home orders), donations to schools increased, implying both demand-side and supply-side effects. We observe an increased level of concern from existing platform contributors through increased per-donor contributions, especially toward high-need schools. Moreover, we found a shift in donation patterns, wherein donors swiftly adapted to renewed priorities and redistributed their resources to immediate needs around digital learning infrastructure. Our findings reveal the pivotal role digital platforms can play in facilitating community resilience during times of crisis.

Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2022

Essays on User Engagement in Online Collaborative Communities

Recently, the phenomenon of crowdfunding has surfaced as an innovative way to raise capital for v... more Recently, the phenomenon of crowdfunding has surfaced as an innovative way to raise capital for venture opportunities online. Using data from a unique crowdfunding platform, we examine whether opting for “prefunding”, or raising awareness prior to fund-raising, increases the likelihood of a campaign meeting its fund-raising goal. We also examine how prefunding activities influence fundraising dynamics to show that prefunding activities significantly increase the likelihood of a campaign meeting its fund-raising goal, and that the relationship between prefunding and project success is mediated by the number of backers and quality of backers. We take an in-depth look at projects that use prefunding and find that it is effective when entrepreneurs keep potential backers informed and ensure that they are engaged

Other Financial Economics eJournal, 2020

The growing consensus that human intelligence and artificial intelligence (AI) are complementary ... more The growing consensus that human intelligence and artificial intelligence (AI) are complementary has led to the emergence of AI-augmented systems. In this paper, we investigate whether AI agents influence human decisions in the high-risk environments of initial coin offering (ICO) where most ICO fail. Using panel data from a leading ICO evaluation platform that uses AI to augment human experts, we examine how humans integrate the assessments of AI agents into their assessments when real outcomes are at stake. Our results show that AI agents exert an asymmetric influence on human decisions. When the AI agent rates an ICO low, the decisions of human experts follow it. When the AI agent rates an ICO high, the decisions of human experts deviate from it. Thus, we conclude that human experts use the AI agent’s low score to screen out ICOs and use the agent’s high score as a trigger to investigate an ICO more deeply and come to their own conclusions about its potential. The same human expe...

Free sampling, which has been widely applied and studied in marketing, has recently been adopted ... more Free sampling, which has been widely applied and studied in marketing, has recently been adopted by entrepreneurs on crowdfunding platforms. Using a dataset from a unique crowdfunding platform, we study whether opting to provide free samples to potential backers increases the likelihood of a campaign meeting its goal. We also investigate how free sampling influences the fundraising dynamics. Using a matched sample of crowdfunding campaigns, we demonstrate that providing free samples significantly improves crowdfunding performance. And among those projects which opt for free sampling, persuasion effect during the report period contributes to the positive effect. The higher the score from the evaluator, the more successful the campaign will be. We also find that the longer the investors are exposed to the evaluation report, the more money is raised.

As artificial intelligence is increasingly used in assisting and augmenting different tasks, it i... more As artificial intelligence is increasingly used in assisting and augmenting different tasks, it is now imperative to understand how A.I. influences human decision making. Using data collected from a leading ICO evaluation platform, we empirically investigate whether and how human domain experts’ judgments are influenced by A.I. bots. Our preliminary results suggest that experts are consistently influenced by artificial intelligence regardless of whether the project is successful or not, and whether the A.I. bot’s evaluation was correct or wrong. Our results also indicate that going through a Pre-ICO stage reduces information asymmetry and therefore mitigates the influence of A.I. on experts. This paper contributes to the nascent literature in the areas of human-A.I. interaction, A.I.-facilitated decision making and A.I.-induced biases

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2017

In an increasingly competitive crowdfunding market, entrepreneurs are seeking out new ways to imp... more In an increasingly competitive crowdfunding market, entrepreneurs are seeking out new ways to improve their likelihood of success. This is one of the reasons for the emergence of prefunding platforms, which help entrepreneurs to raise awareness of their forthcoming fund-raising projects. Using data from an online crowdfunding platform, we show that opting for prefunding prior to fund-raising significantly increases the likelihood of a campaign meeting its fund-raising goal. We also find that prefunding projects transition to the fund-raising stage with a higher number of backers, and a higher contribution size on the first day of funding when compared to non-prefunding projects. This strong head-start on the first day of solicitation then enhances a project's ability to garner funds over the fund-raising window, thus increasing the likelihood of eventual success. Moreover, when entrepreneurs proactively update information about their projects and actively engage with followers during the prefunding period, their campaigns are more likely to launch with a higher number of backers and higher contribution size. Our study has important implications for both entrepreneurs and crowdfunding platforms.