時間：3月23日(四) 下午 1:20 – 3:10
地點：交大光復校區管理二館MB312
講者介紹：Professor Rachel Chen (UC Davis)美國加州大學Davis分校副教授
Her work has been published in leading journals, including IIE Transactions, Management Science, Marketing Science, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Operations Research Letters and Production and Operations Management.
She is an associate editor of Decision Science Journal and IIE Transactions and serves on the editorial reviewer board of Production and Operations Management. She is a former associate editor of the Decision Science Journal.

Title 1: Reward-based crowdfunding campaigns: informational value and access to venture capital
Abstract: Consider an entrepreneur who designs a reward-based crowdfunding campaign when the campaign provides a signal about the future demand for the product and subsequent Venture Capital (VC) is needed. Her design entails choosing both the goal that has to be reached for the campaign to be successful, and the pledge level that entitles campaign backers to the product if it becomes available. While failure to reach the goal sends a negative signal likely to eliminate the entrepreneur's access to VC funding, succeeding does not guarantee subsequent VC funding either because the signal obtained in the campaign is not necessarily accurate. The prospect of lack of VC funding following a successful campaign creates concerns for backers, as they lose their pledges without receiving anything in return in this case. We find that both the informativeness of the campaign and considerations related to gaining access to VC funding affect the choice of campaign instruments, as well as the decision of whether to run a campaign. When the extent of informativeness of the campaign is very low so that the number of campaign backers has no impact on the VC's decision, the entrepreneur prefers to launch a campaign. She is also in favor of running a campaign when informativeness is relatively high. When informativeness is relatively low but the VC does take into account the number of backers in his decision, circumstances may arise under which the entrepreneur prefers approaching the VC directly without running a campaign. Finally, we show that the VC is less likely to prefer crowdfunding than the entrepreneur.

Title 2: Fit-revelation Sampling and Advertising: Complements or Substitutes?
Abstract: Consumers are often uncertain about how a product fits their individual preferences. To alleviate consumers' concern, sampling can be offered to resolve their fit uncertainties before buying. We refer to sampling with such a focus as fit-revelation sampling. In practice, sampling is often offered jointly with advertising. Empirical research has shown sampling may enhance or weaken the effect of advertising. Built upon these studies, our paper develops an analytic model to examine whether fit-revelation sampling is complementary or substitute with persuasive and market expansion (ME) advertising, respectively. When sampling itself helps enhance the valuation added through persuasive advertising, conventional wisdom suggests that the firm might increase its advertising effort after adoption of sampling, i.e., sampling and persuasive ads are complements. However, we find that the firm might want to scale down its advertising effort in case the probability for a consumer to realize a good fit is small. On the other hand, substitutability arises whenever sampling weakens the effect of persuasive advertising. For ME ads, complementarity arises as long as fit-revelation sampling is preferable to no sampling. Otherwise, fit-revelation sampling and ME ads are substitutes