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A network of partners helps and assists a crowdfunding platform (CFP) in scouting, assessing and selecting projects. This cooperation increases the number of successful projects by attracting a sizable number of investors, proponents and attracting marginal investors when a campaign falls short of the threshold for success. This study examines the role of partner networks in a platform ecosystem, specifically in terms of number of different partners and their diversity in the performance of the crowdfunding campaign.

Using logistic and linear regressions, we analyze a sample of 233 projects, both funded and not funded, launched by 10 Italian equity CFPs between 2014 and 2018.

Our findings indicate that the variety of partners in a platform's network influence the probability of campaign success and how much capital the proponent company raises. CFPs are resource-constrained new ventures, and a network with a wider variety of partners ensures the strategic resources and competencies that are required in an early stage market, thus facilitating campaign funding.

The variety of partner networks could help CFPs to offer unique and strategic value propositions and define the competitive positioning of platforms.

This study provides a deeper understanding of the determinants of equity crowdfunding campaign performance by emphasizing the role of CFP's network of partners on the entire crowdfunding ecosystem and its underlying organizational elements.

Consumer credit as a proportion of household debt has grown considerably during the last 20 years across many developed countries. A fairly extensive literature from the field of empirical psychology has provided evidence that personality factors and attitudes may influence individuals’ debt financing decisions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the importance of attitude to credit and three main research questions are addressed. Is there any relationship between attitude and use of consumer credit? Are there any differences between the attitudes of credit users and non‐users that can be associated with motivations for using consumer credit? Does attitude towards credit affect preferences for the financing of consumption?

The authors provide answers based on the results of an original survey of the use of consumer credit conducted on a wide sample of Italian households, which allowed the authors to asses the respondents’ attitudes towards credit and to examine them with respect to credit decisions, controlling for several socio‐economic variables.

The findings indicate that the influence of attitude on consumer credit decisions cannot be ruled out. Attitude toward credit appears to play an important role and is significantly related to motivations for using credit and to the method of choice for financing consumption.

This study improves on most existing research on these topics in the particularly large size and scope of the sample, and also because several studies from the psychological field lack a thorough assessment of household economic conditions and expectations.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue of Review of Behavioural Finance entitled “Behavioural finance: the role of psychological factors in financial decisions”.

The authors present a brief outline of the origins of behavioural economics; discuss the role that experimental and survey methods play in the study of financial behaviour; summarise the contributions made by the papers in the issue and consider their implications; and assess why research in behavioural finance is important for finance researchers and practitioners.

The primary input to behavioural finance has been from experimental psychology. Methods developed within sociology such as surveys, interviews, participant observation, focus groups have not had the same degree of influence. Typically, these methods are even more expensive than experimental ones and so costs of using them may be one reason for their lack of impact. However, it is also possible that the training of finance academics leads them to prefer methodologies that permit greater control and a clearer causal interpretation.

The paper shows that interdisciplinary research is becoming more widespread and it is likely that greater collaboration between finance and sociology will develop in the future.