Do social network crowds help fundraising campaigns? Effects of social influence on crowdfunding performance

Yang Liu, Yuan Chen and Zhi-Ping Fan

Journal of Business Research, 2021, vol. 122, issue C, 97-108

Abstract: The fundraising of crowdfunding campaigns is potentially influenced by the founder’s digital reputation and project-sharing cascades via social networks. Our paper empirically examines the effects of this social influence on crowdfunding performance, specifically looking at Jingdong Crowdfunding and Weibo in China. Our results show that the social influence of the founder’s digital reputation in terms of the number of followers and identity status, as well as of project-sharing cascades are positively associated with crowdfunding performance. We also find a quadratic effect of social network post volume, which positively impacts crowdfunding performance under a certain threshold and negatively affects it above that threshold. Additionally, we further analyze the impact of social influence on the number of funders and low-sum funders respectively and find social influence tends to bring more social network crowds to engage in crowdfunding who are more likely to contribute a small amount. Our study demonstrates that the social network integration of crowdfunding can leverage crowdfunding performance.

Keywords: Rewards-based crowdfunding; Social networks; Social influence; Digital reputation; Cascades (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296320305506
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jbrese:v:122:y:2021:i:c:p:97-108

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2020.08.052

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Research is currently edited by A. G. Woodside

More articles in Journal of Business Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().