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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.

This is a study of analysts’ use of accounting information for valuation purposes in a venture capital setting. This setting is characterized in terms of the distinctive scouting and coaching work of venture capital funders, and the unproven and incomplete nature of the ventures and entrepreneurs, which seek funding to scale operations, pivot into new markets, internationalize, or undertake some other kind of fundamental change. Based on interviews with entrepreneurs (project-makers) and venture funders (analysts), a four phase model of valuation is proposed. The model illuminates that, in contrast with common assumptions in the existing literature, accounting is mobilized neither to reveal truth nor constitute knowledge about the objects of investment, but to promise and to care. This paper articulates these two concepts in the context of accounting. Promising is shown to be a means not to implement a predesigned business plan and a budgeted set of activities but to commit to a new and unclear future and agree high and sometimes unrealistic expectations. Caring is shown not to be a means to predict a final fate for the organization, but to give and take, interact and sometimes discipline in order to determine what is necessary to preserve and possible to change. Understanding that what is valued is not what exists but what is possible to create helps to resolve puzzles about accounting’s uncertain and ambiguous status and significance in the entrepreneurial economy. It also and more generally illustrates how accounting operates in relation to an unknowable object and future: not as a means to know or reveal but to write and rewrite a daring and ambitious narrative in which the protagonists (here the project-maker and venture) become something else (a manager and an organization).

The recently born expression "analytic narratives" refers to studies that have appeared at the boundaries of history, political science, and economics. These studies purport to explain specific historical events by combining the usual narrative way of historians with the analytic tools that economists and political scientists find in rational choice theory. Game theory is prominent among these tools. The paper explains what analytic narratives are by sampling from the eponymous book Analytic Narratives by Bates, Greif, Levi, Rosenthal, and Weingast (1998) and covering one outside study by Mongin (2008). It first evaluates the explanatory performance of the new genre, using some philosophy of historical explanation and then checks its discursive consistency, using some narratology. The paper concludes that analytic narratives can usefully complement standard narratives in historical explanation, provided they specialize in the gaps that these narratives reveal and that they are discursively consistent, despite the tension that combining a formal model with a narration creates. Two expository modes, called alternation and local supplementation, emerge from the discussion as the most appropriate ones to resolve this tension