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The purpose of this paper is to focus on investigating the impact of crowd participation on degree of project success, which is defined as the total amount of funds a project can obtain after it reaches its initial funding goal threshold.

Drawing on the theory of crowd capital, this study develops six hypotheses about the impact of crowd capability of a fundraiser (i.e. project updates, goal setting, reward levels and social media usage) and crowd participation (i.e. namely, funds pledge and on-site communication) on degree of project success. The hypotheses are tested using data sets of successful projects collected from two popular crowdfunding websites.

This study finds that funds pledge has an inverse U-shaped relationship with degree of project success. Project updates, reward levels and on-site communication positively influence degree of project success, while funding goal negatively affects degree of project success.

This study contributes to prior literature by investigating the degree of project success determinants using the perspectives of both fundraisers and crowds, which provides a more comprehensive understanding of what makes a crowdfunded project a success.

The empirical results of this study provide fundraisers with guidelines about how to access more funds after achieving the initial funding goals.

This work is one of the first to investigate the degree of project success and its determinants from the perspectives of both fundraisers and crowds.

This paper analyses the factors that make fashion-product crowdfunding campaigns successful. The authors argue that crowdfunding is an innovative and functional way of bringing new fashion items to the market. The purpose of this paper is to answer the question whether product innovation, lifecycle and sustainability have a positive effect on the success of fashion crowdfunding campaigns. The findings highlight that the success of the fashion crowdfunding campaigns depends on creators' adherence to the values of the platform which they use to raise capital.

A total of 300 fashion crowdfunding projects running between the 17th of October and the 15th of December 2017 were collected from Kickstarter – the world's largest crowdfunding platform based on reward-based all-or-nothing model. Two-step binomial logistic regression was used to analyse the data.

The model predicted a significant increase in the odds of success for the fashion items crowdfunded during the first-time production, and innovative and environmentally sustainable products with a higher price range of rewards. In line with previous literature, regression analyses predicted a significant effect of the control variables of goal amount (negative) and the number of rewards (positive). Contrary to previous studies, neither the presence of a video nor the campaign length predicted success.

The novel findings of this study contribute to the literature by providing an analysis of success factors of fashion items on crowdfunding platforms. The results show that innovative, environmentally sustainable and higher-priced products produced by early-stage ventures are better welcomed by the audiences.

Guided by the collective action theory, signaling theory and social identity approach, this study examines backing behavior by individuals who have created projects under CC licenses. Two motivational mechanisms were examined: (1) identification via common interests in the CC space; (2) resource signaling by other users via their diverse project creation experience, funding or commenting activity.

Data were collected from Kickstarter.com. Exponential random graph modeling was used to examine how the two reviewed mechanisms influence the tie formation probability between Creative Commons (CC) project creators and other creators. The analysis was conducted on two subnetworks: one with ties between CC creators; and one with ties from CC creators to non-CC creators.

The study found that CC creators exhibit distinct backing patterns when considering funding other CC creators compared to non-CC users. When considering funding their peer CC creators, CC identity can help them allocate and support perceived in-group members; when considering funding non-CC creators, shared common interests in competitive project categories potentially triggers a competition mindset and makes them hold back when they see potential rivals.

This study makes three contributions. First, it draws from multiple theoretical frameworks to investigate unique motivations when crowdfunders take on dual roles of creators and funders and offered implications on how to manage competition and collaboration simultaneously. Second, with network analysis our study not only identifies multiple motivators at work for collective action, but also demonstrates their differential effects in crowdfunding. Third, the integration of multiple theoretical frameworks allows opportunities for theory building.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-05-2020-0166.

Prior research treated entrepreneurs’ actions as purely opportunistic and voluntary, excluding social and economic systems’ influence on entrepreneurial actions. However, the applications of communication strategies, project management and social network are anchored in socioeconomic systems in which the entrepreneurs are rooted. To address the gap, this study aims to articulate – through the prism of institutional theory – how restaurant crowdfunding (CF) success is affected by socioeconomic prosperity according to entrepreneurs’ race and geographic area.

The current study analyzed 2,008 restaurant CF projects launched in the USA through the Kickstarter platform from 2010 to 2020. By conducting one-way analysis of variance and multilevel mixed-effect logistic regression models, this study examined the relative socioeconomic prosperity and CF success according to the race of the restaurant entrepreneurs. The study also examined how socioeconomic prosperity affected CF success and how that relationship was moderated by the entrepreneurs’ level of restaurant experience.

This study finds that relative socioeconomic prosperity and CF success does differ according to race. Also in the CF context, lower socioeconomic prosperity does impede fundraising success. While the level of restaurant experience significantly increased an entrepreneur’s CF success, the impact was not so significant as to overcome the impact of socioeconomic prosperity.

Drawing on institutional theory, this study examines the impact of socioeconomic prosperity on CF project outcomes. By uncovering the significant impact of socioeconomic systems on CF success, this study fills the research gap. Previous studies have generally treated minority entrepreneurs as an aggregated form. The authors’ results extend the literature by including major ethnic groups – whites, African Americans and Asians.

The findings of the current study show restaurant entrepreneurs can raise the likelihood of CF success by doing two things: first, accumulate experience in the restaurant industry; second, use their CF websites to highlight testimonials about the value of that experience. Federal, state and local governments can institute policies to help improve racial minorities’ socioeconomic conditions and thereby promote startups’ fundraising success.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first to examine unexplored institutional effect on CF outcomes. It examines how and why socioeconomic factors affect minority entrepreneurs’ funding success. It compares the prosperity and CF success of white, African American and Asian entrepreneurs.

This paper aims to investigate female founders’ digital identities (i.e. the founder’s online self-representation) and explore how female founders’ digital identities affect crowdfunding performance.

Leveraging a data set of 3,125 Kickstarter crowdfunding campaigns launched by women between 2014 and 2019, this study uses the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic model to investigate female founders’ digital identities and explore their impacts on crowdfunding performance via logistic and Tobit regression analyses.

This study finds that on crowdfunding platforms, female founders display four main types of digital identities: educational practitioner, experienced entrepreneur, creative innovator and life dreamer. Moreover, our results reveal the differential influences of these identities on crowdfunding performance. Specifically, the experienced entrepreneur or educational practitioner portrayal may benefit fundraising; the life dreamer portrayal may hinder it; and the creative innovator portrayal may have no significant effect.

This study suggests how women can use their digital identities to improve their crowdfunding performance, indicating a fruitful way to overcome female entrepreneurial financing hurdles in the digital age.

This study highlights the digital identities of female founders engaged in crowdfunding, enriching the emerging research on digital identity in entrepreneurship and crowdfunding. Furthermore, the application of the LDA topic model in the study enlightens future research on leveraging big data analytic methods to examine female entrepreneurship in the digital economy context.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which rewards-based crowdfunding really does provide financial support for start-ups and small businesses relative to other types of activity such as creative and cultural projects.

The paper reports findings from a series of multiple regression on a unique data set covering around 205,000 rewards-based crowdfunding projects across a number of leading platforms in the USA, the UK and Canada.

The authors report two main findings. First, rewards-based crowdfunding is highly inequitably distributed and that success is concentrated within a relatively small number of platforms and campaigns. Second, crowdfunding campaigns explicitly related to business perform relatively poorly compared with those in other categories; particularly those in creative areas such as music and dance.

These findings call into question the extent to which rewards-based crowdfunding really is a means by which significant numbers of start-ups can bridge gaps in the provision of finance.

For the case of many content features, This paper aims to investigate which content features in video and text ads more contribute to accurately predicting the success of crowdfunding by comparing prediction models.

With 1,368 features extracted from 15,195 Kickstarter campaigns in the USA, the authors compare base models such as logistic regression (LR) with tree-based homogeneous ensembles such as eXtreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) and heterogeneous ensembles such as XGBoost + LR.

XGBoost shows higher prediction accuracy than LR (82% vs 69%), in contrast to the findings of a previous relevant study. Regarding important content features, humans (e.g. founders) are more important than visual objects (e.g. products). In both spoken and written language, words related to experience (e.g. eat) or perception (e.g. hear) are more important than cognitive (e.g. causation) words. In addition, a focus on the future is more important than a present or past time orientation. Speech aids (see and compare) to complement visual content are also effective and positive tone matters in speech.

This research makes theoretical contributions by finding more important visuals (human) and language features (experience, perception and future time). Also, in a multimodal context, complementary cues (e.g. speech aids) across different modalities help. Furthermore, the noncontent parts of speech such as positive “tone” or pace of speech are important.

Founders are encouraged to assess and revise the content of their video or text ads as well as their basic campaign features (e.g. goal, duration and reward) before they launch their campaigns. Next, overly complex ensembles may suffer from overfitting problems. In practice, model validation using unseen data is recommended.

Rather than reducing the number of content feature dimensions (Kaminski and Hopp, 2020), by enabling advanced prediction models to accommodate many contents features, prediction accuracy rises substantially.

The purpose of this paper is to provide empirical evidence on the motivation of supporters to contribute resources to reward-based crowdfunding campaigns.

The paper reports results from a survey combining open and closed questions, addressing supporters of reward-based crowdfunding campaigns in the field of video game development. Publicly available data from a large crowdfunding website complements the approach.

Two groups of supporters emerge from the data: one group derives motivation almost exclusively from a purchasing motive, the other group displays the purchasing motive alongside an altruistic and involvement motive. There is little indication that social acknowledgement plays a role for supporter motivation. Supporters rely on the evaluation of previous activities of an entrepreneur to judge trustworthiness.

The manuscript offers empirical insights into the previously scarcely researched question why supporters contribute to reward-based crowdfunding. These insights inform research on reward-based crowdfunding and help entrepreneurs considering reward-based crowdfunding as a way to fund entrepreneurial activities.

In recent years, crowdfunding is assuming an increasingly central role in the development of business projects as an alternative financing tool to traditional sources. This study analyses the role of communication in the success of crowdfunding campaigns in the restaurant sector in the European context.

This study conducts a regression analysis on a sample of 442 European restaurant crowdfunding projects launched on the Kickstarter platform in a time period spanning from 2014 to 2021. More specifically, this study uses a logistic regression model to test the impact of communication on the success of restaurant crowdfunding projects.

Empirical results suggest a strong impact of communication, declined in its different forms, on the success of restaurant crowdfunding campaigns. More specifically, they highlight a positive impact of the number of images, number of videos, readability and community orientation of the project description, number of comments and number of updates on the success of restaurant crowdfunding projects.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study represents the first research that examines the effect of the communication on the success of restaurant crowdfunding projects conducted in the European context.

Many businesses invest significant resources to develop human, social and psychological capital, yet Crowdfunding (CF) activities have the potential to build all of these non-financial forms of capital at the same time as raising finance. The purpose of this paper is to explore the non-financial forms of capital that entrepreneurs and businesses using online CF activities can gain from their backers without having to ask for it.

The study used thematic, qualitative analysis to explore the comments and queries that crowdfunders posted on the publicly visible message board of individual CF projects on Kickstarter, one of the world’s leading crowdfunding platforms (CFPs).

Fund-seekers can gain more than money from crowdfunders: they can enhance their own human capital (e.g. knowledge of the viability of the project), social capital (e.g. the development of a bonding relationship) and psychological capital (e.g. self-efficacy and resilience) by effectively interpreting unsolicited comments and questions.

This study is based on typed comments on CFP message boards, which limits insights into underlying reasons and motivations. However, the qualitative analysis of message board comments demonstrates how this type of data can be utilised to explore crucial aspects of CF that have to date been neglected.

Comments from many crowdfunders can provide useful information to fund-seeking entrepreneurs and businesses, although some of it may require interpretation.

The opportunity for fund-seekers to gain non-financial capital from crowdfunders, without having to ask for it, has not previously been explicitly considered in the field.