Crowdfunding Dynamics Tracking: A Reinforcement Learning Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a reinforcement learning-based method called TC3-Options for predicting crowdfunding funding progress, capturing decision-making dynamics and pattern types, validated on real data.

Contribution

It proposes a novel actor-critic reinforcement learning framework with pattern subdivision and options extension for crowdfunding dynamics prediction.

Findings

Effective prediction of funding progress demonstrated on Indiegogo data.

Identification of U-shaped funding patterns as dominant.

Enhanced modeling of investor-campaign decision interactions.

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed the increasing interests in research of crowdfunding mechanism. In this area, dynamics tracking is a significant issue but is still under exploration. Existing studies either fit the fluctuations of time-series or employ regularization terms to constrain learned tendencies. However, few of them take into account the inherent decision-making process between investors and crowdfunding dynamics. To address the problem, in this paper, we propose a Trajectory-based Continuous Control for Crowdfunding (TC3) algorithm to predict the funding progress in crowdfunding. Specifically, actor-critic frameworks are employed to model the relationship between investors and campaigns, where all of the investors are viewed as an agent that could interact with the environment derived from the real dynamics of campaigns. Then, to further explore the in-depth implications of patterns (i.e., typical characters) in funding series, we propose to subdivide them into $\textit{fast-growing}$ and $\textit{slow-growing}$ ones. Moreover, for the purpose of switching from different kinds of patterns, the actor component of TC3 is extended with a structure of options, which comes to the TC3-Options. Finally, extensive experiments on the Indiegogo dataset not only demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods, but also validate our assumption that the entire pattern learned by TC3-Options is indeed the U-shaped one.