In the recent years, crowdfunding (a phenomenon where individuals collectively contribute money to back different goals and projects through the internet) has been gaining a lot of attention especially for its socio-economic impact. This dissertation explores this phenomenon in three distinct but related essays. The first essay explores the nature and dynamics of backers’ contributions and uses the insights generated to develop a forecasting model that can predict crowdfunding campaign outcomes. The second essay investigates how creators’ crowdfunding campaign design decisions impact their funding and post-funding outcomes. Interestingly, the essay highlights that certain crowdfunding campaign design decisions have differential effects on both funding and post-funding phases and this has implications for creators, backers, and crowdfunding platform owners. Finally, the third essay investigates whether creators’ post-funding relations-building efforts with backers matter and how such relations-building efforts might impact the performance of their subsequent crowdfunding campaign. In general, this dissertation not only increases our understanding of the crowdfunding phenomenon across the funding and post-funding phases, it also provides insights and tools that can help stakeholders maximize the benefits accruable to them when they engage in crowdfunding.

The object of the research is a rolling unit of a railroad train. The subject of the research is the process of identification and tracking of shipped products. The relevance of this study is due to a number of factors. Firstly, the automation and accuracy of the shipment control system will optimize logistics processes, ensuring focus on the end user and preventing cases of delivery to the wrong addressee. Secondly, the automatic formation of documents based on the data received from the control system significantly increases the efficiency and reliability of accounting and reporting at the enterprise. The purpose of the work is to develop a tool using computer vision methods for control and identification of shipped products in the production environment of an industrial enterprise. The result of the work is a tool for automatic collection and processing of data for the formation of shipping documents based on the video stream from the surveillance camera of a passing railroad train. / Объект исследования – подвижная единица железнодорожного состава. Предмет исследования – процесс идентификации и отслеживания отгружаемой продукции. Актуальность данного исследования обусловлена рядом факторов. Во-первых, автоматизация и точность системы контроля отгрузки позволит оптимизировать логистические процессы, обеспечивая ориентированность на конечного потребителя и предотвращая случаи доставки не тому адресату. Во-вторых, автоматическое формирование документов на основе данных, полученных от системы контроля, существенно повышает оперативность и достоверность учета и отчетности на предприятии. Цель работы – разработка инструмента, использующего методы компьютерного зрения, для контроля и идентификации отгружаемой продукции в производственных условиях промышленного предприятия. Результатом работы является инструмент для автоматического сбора и обработки данных для формирования отгрузочных документов на основе видеопотока с камеры наблюдения за проходящим железнодорожным составом.