Prakash Mirchandani

This paper investigates two marketing strategies a reward-based crowdfunding platform employs to align its preferences with an entrepreneur’s choice of pledge and target levels. These are (a) how to promote campaigns to potential backers, and (b) how to share campaign revenues with the entrepreneur. Kickstarter, for instance, promotes a set of campaigns by compiling a list of “recommended” projects. This research shows that the platform’s choice of the promotion rule may expose entrepreneurs to the risk of not generating sufficient funds to start production, which can damage their and the platform’s reputation. When the platform’s reputational risk is not very high, it reduces the risk of non-delivery by increasing the revenue share of the entrepreneur. The platform’s strategies are likely to ensure production when backers derive warm glow from pledging, when the entrepreneur’s development cost is low, or when the entrepreneur has minimal reputational cost if production fails. However, low reputational costs motivate the entrepreneur to lower the target, thus increasing the likelihood of insufficient funds to start production. We propose strategies the platform can use, including customizing the revenue share based on the campaign characteristics, to rectify such misalignments.

The accelerating convergence of geopolitical volatility, technological disruption, environmental stress, and societal transformation has rendered traditional strategic management frameworks insufficient. Organizations now operate in environments defined not only by disruptions with existential implications but by wickedness—conditions in which problems are ambiguous, stakeholders disagree, and solutions reshape the challenge itself. Building on the premise that strategy itself is a wicked problem, this article advances a central claim: organizational resilience is best understood as an architectural capability largely grounded in humanity-based identity. Unlike organizational structure, mission, or even current strategy, each of which may be transient in turbulent environments, organizational identity, which is a construct that derives from individuals and humanity, provides an enduring basis for harmonizing the organization and its environment. Utilizing the lens of “humanity”—in its two dimensions of humankind and humaneness—we synthesize research on wicked problems, organizational identity, dynamic capabilities, modular design, alliances and smart power, and hybrid intelligence. We then propose an integrative model linking humanity-driven identity to resilience through three vectors—Inspirational Transformative Ambition, Innovative Value Networks, and Hybrid Intelligence Ecosystems—operationalized via a recently developed diagnostic tool. Finally, we offer corroborative evidence for the “Business of Humanity” logic, arguing that aligning humankind (opportunity across the full market spectrum) with humaneness (values-based evaluation) strengthens resilience by expanding opportunity sets while enhancing legitimacy, trust, and stakeholder alignment.

This paper investigates two marketing strategies a reward-based crowdfunding platform employs to align its preferences with an entrepreneur’s choice of pledge and target levels. These are (a) how to promote campaigns to potential backers, and (b) how to share campaign revenues with the entrepreneur. Kickstarter, for instance, promotes a set of campaigns by compiling a list of “recommended” projects. This research shows that the platform’s choice of promotion rule may expose entrepreneurs to the risk of not generating sufficient funds to start production, which can damage the platform’s reputation. When the platform’s reputational risk is not very high, it reduces the risk of non-delivery by increasing the revenue share of the entrepreneur. The platform’s strategies are likely to ensure production when backers are more altruistic, when the entrepreneur’s development cost is lower, or when the entrepreneur has minimal reputational cost if production fails. However, low reputational costs motivate the entrepreneur to lower the target, thus increasing the likelihood of insufficient funds to start production. We propose strategies the platform can use, including customizing the revenue share based on the campaign characteristics, to rectify such misalignments.

We investigate strategies a reward-based crowdfunding platform employs to align an entrepreneur’s choice of pledge and target levels with its own preferences. We consider two instruments the platform can employ: the way it chooses to promote campaigns to potential backers, and its share of the campaign revenues. Kickstarter, for instance, promotes a select set of campaigns by compiling a list of projects on its “recommended list.” We find that in choosing its promotion and sharing rule the platform exposes entrepreneurs to the risk of not generating sufficient funds to start production. Only when the damage to the platform’s reputation, in case the entrepreneur fails to fulfil her obligations, is sufficiently high, does the platform’s promotion and sharing rules strategies ensure that any promoted campaign will have sufficient funds to start production. The strategies utilized by the platform are more likely to ensure production when backers are more altruistic, when the development cost is lower, or when the entrepreneur has minimal liability and reputational cost in case production fails. In such instances, the entrepreneur is motivated to set a low target, which increases the likelihood that the funds raised are insufficient to start production despite raising enough to meet the campaign’s target. The platform’s choice of promotion and sharing rule is intended to rectify such misalignments on the part of the entrepreneur.

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In this paper, we develop a queuing model for a traffic-adaptive strategy to control a 2-phase intersection. The strategy is an approximation of the RHODES strategy, which essentially "switches to next phase when the served queue clears". In fact, Newell was the first to compare such a strategy with rolling horizon using a continuous-time formulation. This model can be used to analyze vehicular delays and queue distributions at an intersection with a two-phase signal, where the vehicle arrival process is Poisson, for both fixed timing signal control and traffic-adaptive signal control. Numerical results for the two control strategies are provided and compared.