Individual’s financial investment decision-making in reward-based crowdfunding: evidence from China

ABSTRACT

This article extends the work of Cecere et al. (Appl. Econ., 49(57): 5802–5813, 2017) and explores the antecedents of backers’ decision to invest in projects from eight categories on a reward-based crowdfunding platform in China. We extract data from 2011 to 2016 from the pioneer Chinese reward-based crowdfunding site ‘Demohour’. Our empirical investigation using OLS reveals that feedback score, social capital (followers on Weibo, project sharing on social media) and project quality (number of updates) are key motivating factors in investment decision and subsequently, project success or failure. Robustness tests also confirm the findings.

KEYWORDS:

• Crowdfunding
• backers
• financial investment decision
• online feedback
• China

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• G19
• L19
• M13
• M21

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.