Can Descriptive Information in Reward-Based Crowdfunding Affect Financing Performance?

Liu Zhiying; Peng Baoan; Ma Chaoliang

doi:doi:10.16538/j.cnki.fem.2018.09.007

Summary

In traditional time, self-financing and angel investment are the major methods for project financing. In the Internet era, crowdfunding has become the popular financing mode for many innovative projects. This model greatly promotes the commercialization of innovative projects and becomes an important booster of " mass entrepreneurship and innovation”. Without expensive intermediary institutions, the transaction cost of crowdfunding is very low compared with the traditional financial mode. Many entrepreneurs choose to take this kind of financing mode and thus crowdfunding gets rapid development recently. However, crowdfunding is still in the emerging stage and has lots of problems such as the lack of experience in participants and information asymmetry. Therefore, how to raise the success rate of crowdfunding is an urgent problem.　　For the reward-based crowdfunding, the " pre-sale” business model is adopted and investors play a role of consumers in crowdfunding. Before the crowdfunding project makes success, investors are unable to access the product and it is difficult for investors to estimate the quality of the product. Therefore, investors’ trust in fund-raisers has a great influence on investment decisions. So how do fund-raisers pass on the right information to potential investors to gain their trust? Fund-raisers can only use descriptive information to pass on the information in crowdfunding. Descriptive information refers to the information of a person’s situation through a series of structural representations, such as the description of personal experiences, current conditions, or future prospects, in order to portray their qualities and characteristics to the outside world. In crowdfunding, descriptive information is the narrative language which reflects the fund-raiser’s situation, including the status of crowdfunding projects. It has been proved that descriptive information plays an important role in the economic field, and the business plan statement of entrepreneurs serves as an information bridge in financial transactions with a high degree of uncertainty. Similarly, descriptive information is also believed to play an important part in reward-based crowdfunding. Using the descriptive information to shape their own traits, Fund-raisers increase the potential trust of investors and thus influence investment decisions. Based on the theory of social exchange, our research divides the descriptive information of fund-raisers in reward-based crowdfunding into two aspects and uses the elaboration likelihood model, taking trust as the center path and communication as the edge of path to study the influence mechanism of the descriptive information of fund-raisers on financing performance in reward-based crowdfunding. This study examines the following issues: First, does fund-raisers’ descriptive information affect financing performance? Second, is the relationship between descriptive information and financing performance affected by the type of project? Third, is the effect of different kinds of characteristic information in descriptive information on financing performance the same? Using the 401 data set of domestic crowdfunding website, the empirical results show that the more the number of feature information, the number of project updates and the number of comments is, the higher the percent of financing is; for different project types, the descriptive information’s effects on the percent of financing are different; for different kinds of characteristic information, the impacts are also different.　　The main contributions of this paper are: First, based on the social exchange theory, our research uses the elaboration likelihood model to discuss the relationship among trust, communication and financing performance and explores the influence of descriptive information on financing performance. The results bring some insights to the research of crowdfunding financing performance. Second, our research introduces the characteristic information as an index of descriptive information, which is more objective and accurate since the index of alphanumeric or spelling accuracy cannot fully cover the characteristics of descriptive information. Our research provides some reference value to future research.