The growth of crowdfunding markets that include both expert and nonexpert investors will soon accelerate due to recent changes in Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) regulations. Prior work has suggested that nonexperts (1) may benefit from experts’ participation via mimicking their trades, but (2) will also face a cost, as experts crowding nonexperts out of the best opportunities will ensure that nonexperts will suffer lower returns than experts. Traditional economic theory holds that the crowding effect means that the relative importance of nonexperts in the market will decline over time until they become unimportant. Exploiting a unique period in one crowdfunding market (Prosper.com) that allowed us to directly estimate the net cost of competing with better-informed experts, we found that the net negative effects of expert participation on nonexperts are small. We used simulations to both better understand (1) the market characteristics and crowdfunding platform choices that influence experts’ and nonexperts’ returns, their return gap, and the extent to which nonexperts are better or worse off relative to a market without expert participation, and (2) the factors that may contribute to the small expert/nonexpert Prosper return gap.

中文翻译：

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在线众筹市场中的专家与非专家

由于最近证券交易委员会 (SEC) 法规的变化，包括专家和非专家投资者在内的众筹市场的增长将很快加速。先前的研究表明，非专家 (1) 可能会通过模仿他们的交易从专家的参与中获益，但 (2) 也将面临成本，因为专家将非专家排挤在最佳机会之外将确保非专家的回报低于专家。传统经济学理论认为，拥挤效应意味着非专家在市场中的相对重要性会随着时间的推移而下降，直至变得不重要。利用一个众筹市场 (Prosper.com) 的独特时期，这使我们能够直接估算与消息灵通的专家竞争的净成本，我们发现专家参与对非专家的净负面影响很小。我们使用模拟来更好地理解 (1) 影响专家和非专家回报的市场特征和众筹平台选择、他们的回报差距，以及非专家相对于没有专家参与的市场的好坏程度，以及(2) 可能导致小的专家/非专家 Prosper 回报差距的因素。