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The economic crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic seriously jeopardized small businesses. To survive, many small businesses turned to their networks by launching crowdfunding “rescue” campaigns, which were very successful in eliciting both funding and community support. This study aims to explain this success from the backers' perspective by addressing support intentions in uncertain times. The authors examine backers' paradoxical behavior by investigating the influence of ambiguity aversion (individual uncertainty), business-level uncertainty and environmental uncertainty on backers' intentions to support small businesses and the interaction of uncertainty with backers' well-being.

Survey data from 230 backers of small business rescue campaigns were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

The findings indicate that ambiguity aversion negatively dominates backers' support intentions. However, under the mediating effect of well-being, business-level and environmental uncertainties positively impact backers' intentions, whereas ambiguity aversion becomes non-significant.

Uncertainties are supposed to have a negative influence on individual well-being. By contrast, this study shows that backers' well-being is influenced by the context of the crowdfunding campaign. Uncertain conditions can provide value in addition to the benefits gained by backers from supporting crowdfunding campaigns.

The new age of entrepreneurs recognizes crowdfunding as an innovative and effective means of obtaining funding from backers. However, attracting backers is challenging and related scholarly knowledge lacking. Therefore, this study investigates the diverse factors influencing backer funding intention in reward-based crowdfunding.

This study conducted an online survey of 401 registered backers from two reward-based crowdfunding platforms in Taiwan. Data were analyzed using covariance-based structural equation modeling.

Results show that entrepreneur activeness has a negative effect on perceived risk but positively, while entrepreneur activeness and platform interactivity have a positive effect on backer engagement and backer value creation. Although it had no significant impact on backer engagement, project novelty positively influenced backer value creation. Perceived risk had no influence on either backer engagement or backer value creation. Backer engagement positively influenced backer value creation and backer funding intention, with the former having a positive impact on the latter.

This study provides a multi-perceptual lens by proposing an integration of diverse factors such as entrepreneurial- (entrepreneur activeness), project- (project novelty and perceived risk) and platform-related characteristics (platform interactivity) as antecedents to backer funding intention. By integrating a service-dominant logic perspective into the stimulus-organism-response model, this study highlights the essence of value creation by perceiving backers as value co-creators.

SME funding gaps in developing economies are substantial. Crowdfunding is an innovative way to raise funds that may be part of the solution for closing such gaps. The purpose of this study is to investigate the determinants of crowdfunding contribution intentions in the context of a developing country –Bangladesh.

The authors collect data by using a structured questionnaire distributed through Facebook. The analysis is based on data collected from 252 valid responses and uses the ordered probit regression for estimation. For robustness, the authors also estimate the hypothesized model using ordered logistic regression and OLS regression finding identical results.

The authors find that liking the campaign idea and positive media coverage of a crowdfunding campaign have a positive association with crowdfunding contribution intention. Surprisingly, personal relations, others' recommendation and the location of the campaign's owner were not significantly associated with crowdfunding contribution intention in our study. Moreover, respondents' location in Bangladesh (vs. abroad) and their age are positively associated with contribution intention, while education is negatively associated with intention.

Earlier studies focused on the determinants of ex post crowdfunding intentions in developed and more mature crowdfunding markets. The authors contribute by examining ex ante crowdfunding contribution intentions in the developing economy of Bangladesh, which is at the market's inception stage.

Sustainability-oriented projects are prevalent on crowdfunding platforms nowadays. The relationship between crowdfunding and sustainability has attracted the attention of many scholars. This study aims to examine the effects of perceived sustainability orientation on value-co-creation behavior from the perspective of backers and explore the mediation effects of three psychological factors: perceived affective reaction, perceived self-effectiveness and perceived risk.

The study recruits 455 backers to evaluate 100 projects on a crowdfunding platform. Structural equation modeling based on partial least squares is used to analyze data and test the hypotheses.

The results show that perceived sustainability orientation influences value-co-creation behavior through perceived affective reaction and self-effectiveness. Furthermore, perceived sustainability orientation impacts participation behavior through perceived risk.

Our study mainly focuses on sustainability-oriented and reward-based crowdfunding projects. Future research can examine other types of projects and other crowdfunding platforms.

These findings can provide implications for project creators to improve the values co-created with backers in future sustainability-oriented projects. Furthermore, the findings can provide implications for backers and help them evaluate crowdfunding projects.

The existing studies are mostly concerned with project creators’ perspectives. This paper is one of the few to investigate how a project’s sustainability orientation influences backers’ psychological factors and value-co-creation behavior.

Crowdfunding as an alternative financing method has recently gained ground and become a legitimate and feasible option for supporting creative and cultural projects. Whereas the reasons behind raising money on crowdfunding platforms are easy to understand, there is still a knowledge gap concerning backer’s motivations to fund creative projects. The aim of this study is to investigate backers’ main motivations to contribute to movies and web series crowdfunding projects.

Using PLS-SEM, we analyzed the influence of intrinsic motivation, inner innovativeness, shared values and campaign involvement on perceived trust and perceived risk; the last two were further analyzed in relation to their influence on participation intention (N = 432). Data was collected from Europe and Asia using convenience and snowball sampling through a structured questionnaire.

Perceived trust was found to be positively influenced by intrinsic motivation, shared values and campaign involvement, and perceived risk was surprisingly found to be positively influenced by campaign involvement. Also, perceived trust as generated by platform and crowdfundraiser jointly and perceived risk have a positive influence on participation intention.

This study is a useful tool in the hands of filmmakers and web series producers in the process of crowdfunding campaign design and for the crowdfund platform owner, who will seek to enhance perceived trust in order to attract larger audiences and increase profitability.

This is an original first study to examine the intentions of people from Europe and Asia toward movie and web series crowdfunding projects.

This study adopts self-determination theory and stimulus-organism-response framework to develop a model that explores the motivations of such donors by considering their self-determination needs and extrinsic and intrinsic motivations.

Based on online survey data collected from 436 crowdfunding donors in China, this study follows a structural equation modeling analysis to test hypotheses.

The results indicate that perceived ease of use, perceived self-efficacy and social connection have positive effects on the donation intentions of backers through a combination of extrinsic and intrinsic motivations.

The findings shed light on various extrinsic and intrinsic motivations advancing knowledge of individual fund motivation in donation-based crowdfunding and provide guidelines for the development of donation-based crowdfunding theory and practice.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how influencer endorsement services stimulate funding intention in the context of crowdfunding (donation- and reward-based) and the moderating role played by platform trufvst and funder expertise.

To explore the effects of influencer endorsement services (i.e. perceived congruence, social influence and motivation) on funding intention in different crowdfunding campaigns, the authors developed a conceptual model tested using structural equation modelling. The authors also investigated two potential moderators underlying this relationship: platform trust and funder expertise.

The results of the study indicate that there was a positive effect of influencer endorsement services through the dimension congruence and the funding intention, both for reward- and donation-based crowdfunding. Moreover, they suggest that while perceived congruence has a positive effect on funding intention, when the two contexts are compared, only the moderating roles of platform trust over motivation and the funder expertise over motivation are significant and relevant.

The study has implications for both funders and those who seek to raise money for crowdfunding campaigns. The results offer new insights for developing effective crowdfunding campaigns, e.g. leveraging communication strategies based on the context of the crowdfunding (reward- vs donation-based) and the use of influencers as endorsers.

The present study is, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the first to examine the impact of influencer endorsement services on crowdfunding campaigns, shedding new light on the interdisciplinary connections between service marketing and entrepreneurial finance in terms of fundraising activities. The study opens new and previously under-investigated interdisciplinary research streams. It deepens our understanding of a particular issue relating to the marketing and crowdfunding domain by measuring the impact of the influencer’s endorsement on people’s intention to participate in two different campaigns.

The study aims to explore language style and gender match as a key part of initial trust among potential donors and how this leads to funding success based on the similarity attraction and homophily theories. Empirical analyses of 160 respondents revealed that people are more concerned about “how it is written” (language style) than “who has written it” (gender).

Crowdfunding (CF) is an internet-based method of funding employed by project founders, allowing individuals to raise funds from the crowd to support their projects. It is important for project founders to attract the crowd’s interest as potential funders commonly have limited information about projects. One of the early cues about a project that can be picked up by the crowd in CF projects is the text description of the proposal. This text description is crucial for giving the crowd an understanding of the project and for promoting the crowd’s trust in the founder, encouraging them to fund the CF project. Based on the similarity attraction and homophily theories, this study sets out to explore language style and gender match as key elements of initial trust among potential donors and how they lead to funding success. A 2 × 2 factorial experimental design (e.g. subject, male and female, × male language style and female language style) was used for the study. To determine the sample size of the experiment, this study applied power and sample size estimations to measure how many respondents were needed for the experiment. Based on the power table of effect size, 128 respondents were considered to be a sufficient number for this experiment to ensure sufficient statistical power of 0.8 and a significance level of 0.05. This study fulfilled the requirement by recruiting 160 respondents, which corresponded to 40 subjects per group based on a 2 × 2 factorial design (the respondents’ gender, male and female, and text language style, male and female). The empirical analysis of 160 respondents revealed that people are more concerned about “how it is written” (language style) than “who has written it” (gender).

This paper contributes to project founders’ understanding and knowledge of the importance of linguistic style, which can determine the success of a CF project. One of the important results of this study is that the crowd can identify the author’s gender based on their writing style. Through an experiment applying factorial analysis (2 × 2), it was found that people are more concerned about “how it is written” (language style) than with “who it is written by” (gender). This means that the project founder, if they know who their audience is, should know how to write the project proposal so that it fits the audience’s preferences. More specifically, the success rate of CF projects can be increased by integrating suitable word dimensions in promotions of projects on CF platforms. Therefore, it can be argued that linguistic style is a powerful agent for building a connection with a target audience. The findings of this study can be used as theoretical guidance, and eventually, the potential antecedents of funding intention can be further explored.

This study is subject to several limitations. The result is limited to donation-based CF. As this study focuses on the language style of project founders when they describe their CF projects, donation-based CF was the most appropriate platform for this research. In donation-based CF, the style words are more emotion-based, compared to other CF platforms. The experiment, however, could also be replicated for other CF types such as reward-based CF. One important part of CF projects is persuading the crowd to fund them. It is worth mentioning that reward-based CF involves individuals pledging to a business in exchange for a reward. Yet, even though reward-based CF offers rewards, it is generally considered a subset of donation-based CF because there is no financial return to the backer. Therefore, it is suggested that future research should also consider case studies in reward-based CF. Second, from the persuading perspective, this study focusses on narrative language style only, as it facilitates the crowd’s understanding of a CF project. Future study can further focus on other information content such as videos in the project proposal. Prior research has found that providing a video in a CF project increases the crowd’s confidence in funding (Mitra, 2012). The study is also supported by previous studies that suggest producing a higher quality of video in the project proposal positively related to the success of CF projects (Mollick (2014)).

The result of this study empirically confirmed that the crowd’s willingness to fund a project proposal and their trust are dependent on the text description of the project proposal. The project founders need to know how to describe the content of a project so that it signals the quality of the project, especially in early start-ups. In other words, the way that a project is created and published through a CF platform will send a valuable signal to the potential donors about the project, and they will either find it acceptable or reject it. If the project appears to lack demand among potential donors, it is easier for project founders to quickly identify that the project will fail, without the need to invest additional capital.

The findings of this study have important social implications that provide guidelines for project founders on establishing a strategy to help the crowd understand their projects. At the same time, the findings can help the crowd to make their funding decisions. First, the text language used in the CF project by the project founder plays an important role in presenting the campaign and all the ideas need to be presented in a clear way so that the crowd understands the project. In CF projects, pitch is everything (Varsamis, 2018). The pitch refers to the text or video that is provided by the project founder to show their project proposal to the crowd. Compared with traditional funding channels (such as venture capital, i.e. banks), CF is more convenient for raising funds. This is because the project founders need to show their ideas in a creative way to the crowd online, rather than preparing a complex plan and racking their brains on how they can persuade investors to participate (Wang and Yang (2019)). This research intends to help project founders understand how they can influence the crowd by improving the text language used in their CF projects.

This paper fulfils an identified need to study how the linguistic style of the project founder would lead to the success rate of crowdfunding projects.

This study investigates the relationship between the individual’s levels of innovativeness (ILI) and the individual’s intention to finance (IIF) an equity crowdfunding campaign to understand whether and to what extent individuals' personalities (IP) can foster crowdfunding success.

OLS models are applied based on survey data collected from 385 US and UK citizen respondents. Further, the baseline relationship between ILI and IIF is broken down on the basis of the interactions with two behavioral characteristics: proactive personality (PP) and openness to experience (OE).

Results show a positive relationship between individual’s levels of innovativeness and the individual’s intention to finance an equity crowdfunding campaign. Furthermore, this relationship continues to be positive when moderators are introduced in the models, demonstrating that PP and OE are personal traits that strengthen the main relationship.

Our findings contribute to enriching the stream of literature according to which equity crowdfunding is a helpful tool not only able to bridge the financial gap of companies during the first phase of their life cycle. The findings also contribute to the development of the innovation process, creating also a social identity within the crowdfunding community.

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had a devastating impact on global health care and the economy. The restaurant industry has been especially hit hard by the statewide “stay-at-home” orders. To get back on track, many of these businesses need capital. A new and effective form of fundraising for business startups is crowdfunding (CF). However, there has been little research on the pandemic impact on CF. This study aims to fill this gap by investigating the pandemic-related impact on restaurant CF.

This study extracted all 2,686 restaurant CF projects in the USA from the Kickstarter platform from April 2010 to January 2021. By conducting descriptive analyses and multiple logistic regression models, this study examined the pandemic impact on CF success.

This study finds that, while controlling the effects of other determinants, businesses in the midst of the pandemic are more likely to be successfully funded than businesses unaffected by the pandemic. Findings also reveal that restaurant startups lowered their funding goals and posted more updates/comments/pledge levels during the pandemic, which made projects more likely to be selected as a “Project We Love” and increased the odds of funding success. However, mentioning COVID-19-related information or locating projects in “red zones” are not found to have any significant direct or moderating impact on the funding success.

This study pioneers the research topic restaurant CF and attempts to raise the research attention of small- and medium-sized enterprises and entrepreneurial financing. Using quantitative methods, it provides a new perspective on pandemic-impact research. Social exchange theory is extended to the context of reward-based CF under crisis. Finally, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first investigation of the possible moderating effect of project location on the relationship between restaurant CF characteristics and success.

The findings of this study suggest restaurateurs to be confident about the fundraising of their startup business through reward-based CF, even when located within so-called pandemic red zones, and perform appropriate communication strategies while using the reward-based CF.

This study is one of the earliest to examine the main and moderating effects of the pandemic-related factors on business CF in the hospitality realm. The findings are reference for researchers and restaurateurs on fundraising in a crisis context.