Management Science and Information Systems' Seminar（2019-15）

Title: Ladies First, Gentlemen Third! The Effect of Narrative Perspective on Medical Crowdfunding

Speaker: Xitong Li，HEC Paris

Time: Tuesday, June 25th , 10:00-11:30

Location: Room 217, Guanghua Building 2

Abstract:

As medical crowdfunding becomes increasingly popular, many fundraising campaigns fail to collect enough donations for patients in need and therefore it is important to explore how to craft an effective fundraising campaign. In practice, a majority of fundraising campaigns are narrated from the third-person perspective without knowing whether narrating from the third-person perspective is the most effective approach or not. In this research, we draw upon multiple theories and propose that the relative effectiveness of the first- vs. third-person perspective depends on patient gender. To test the hypotheses, we conduct a randomized field experiment on a leading medical crowdfunding platform in China, involving more than 1.2 million potential donors. The empirical results show that the third-person perspective is more effective in motivating donation-related behaviors for male-patient fundraising campaigns, whereas the first-person perspective is more effective for female-patient fundraising campaigns. Furthermore, we find that the choice of the narrative perspectives matters more for potential donors who do not yet have many historical donations or have fewer friends with donations on the focal fundraising campaigns. The findings generate important theoretical and managerial implications for medical crowdfunding.

Biography:

Xitong Li is an Associate Professor in the department of Information Systems and Operations Management, HEC Paris, France. His recent research interests include the economic and social impacts of using online data/information, and innovative technologies using online data and services. His research has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, Journal of Management Information Systems, ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing Communications and Applications, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man & Cybernetics, IEEE Communications Magazine, and other leading international journals and conference proceedings. His research has recently been granted by ANR AAPG France (solo PI, Agence Nationale de la Recherche in France, equivalent to National Science Foundation in the U.S.) for three years of 2018-2020. He won the Best Paper Award at the 46th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) in 2013 and the OCIS Best Paper Award Finalist at the 77th Academy of Management (AoM) Annual Meeting in 2017. He received his Ph.D. in management from the MIT Sloan School of Management, and his Ph.D. in engineering from Tsinghua University.

Your participation is warmly welcomed!