We examine the impact of increasing whistleblowing bounties on whistleblowers' strategy and regulatory efficiency in detecting fraud. Our analysis shows the regulator extracts information about the incidence of fraud from whistleblowers' actions, and the quality of such information depends on the size of whistleblowing bounties. With a larger bounty, upon receiving a whistleblowing report, the quality of the regulator's information about fraud deteriorates, whereas upon observing no whistleblowing, the information quality about no fraud improves. Although the informational improvement upon no whistleblowing has not been widely discussed, we demonstrate it is a key determinant of the optimal whistleblowing program. We show, considering the informational value of whistleblowing and no whistleblowing, the regulator should set the bounty to encourage more whistleblowing when the prior belief of fraud is stronger and the insider is better informed. Our analysis generates policy and empirical implications for designing and studying whistleblowing programs.

In this paper, we investigate the real effects of information transparency in crowdfunding markets. Our analysis shows that the crowdfunding market features an under‐implementation inefficiency, driven by two types of uncertainty that consumers face: fundamental uncertainty about the entrepreneur's implementation cost, and strategic uncertainty due to potential coordination failures among consumers. We find that when both fundamental and strategic uncertainties are present, eliminating the fundamental uncertainty alone by revealing the implementation cost does not necessarily improve efficiency. Surprisingly, from an ex ante perspective, greater transparency makes the coordination among crowdfunding consumers less efficient, which makes the under‐implementation problem even worse and thus impairs efficiency. Our findings send a message of caution against promoting greater transparency in the crowdfunding market.