Consumer Protection on Kickstarter

Daniel Blaseg (), Christian Schulze () and Bernd Skiera
Additional contact information
Daniel Blaseg: Department of Strategy and General Management, Universitat Ramon Llull, ESADE, 08172 Sant Cugat-Barcelona, Spain
Christian Schulze: Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, 60322 Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Marketing Science, 2020, vol. 39, issue 1, 211–233

Abstract: This article investigates consumer protection on Kickstarter—a popular and sizeable, yet largely unregulated reward-based crowdfunding platform. Specifically, the article focuses on Kickstarter campaigns’ use of price advertising claims (PACs) and their failure to honor the promised discounts. Analyses show that between 2009 and 2016, more than 500,000 consumers who backed a wide variety of game or technology campaigns lost on average $45.72 because of broken PAC promises. Whereas 75% of PAC campaigns did not provide the promised discounts, in almost 50% of all cases backers who were promised a discount paid more, not less, than the retail price. In contrast, backers of campaigns that did not promise a discount received larger effective discounts. Analyzing an extensive data set comprising 34,745 Kickstarter campaigns, complete backing histories of more than 400,000 backers, and more than 4 million consumer comments, complaints, and reviews, we show that broken PAC promises pose a substantial problem to consumers, that the problem is persistent across more than 6 years, and that it has not been resolved through self-regulation by market participants thus far.

Keywords: kickstarter; crowdfunding; consumer protection; self-regulation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2019.1203 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormksc:v:39:y:2020:i:1:p:211-233

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Marketing Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().