Crowds, Experts Agree On What Should Be Funded

In just six years Kickstarter has raised more than $1 billion to fund over 60,000 projects, it’s been contributing more money to the arts than the National Endowment for the Arts on an annual basis since 2012. With crowds playing such an important role in which projects get funded, Wharton professor Ethan Mollick and Harvard Business School professor Ramana Nanda decided to find whether crowds are ‘wise’ or ‘mad’. Put another way, to what extent do they agree with experts and are they able to predict successful projects? They find that crowds are ‘wise,’ and that they can fill a useful function besides just expanding funding for the arts.

“Our findings suggest that crowdfunding can play an important role in complementing...