TY - JOUR
T1 - Emphasizing the entrepreneur or the idea? The impact of text content emphasis on investment decisions in crowdfunding
AU - Wang, Wei
AU - Chen, Wei
AU - Zhu, Kevin
AU - Wang, Hongwei
N1 - Funding Information:
On the one hand, crowdfunding allows a large group of people to pool their money to help fund an idea. In 2009, Kickstarter launched as an innovative way to support creativity and brought a new term “crowdfunding” to the forefront. A crowdfunding campaign introduces an idea to help creative minds get funded by their peers. Therefore, in the evaluation of a campaign, the idea creativity often plays a major role [ 7 ].
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Elsevier B.V.
PY - 2020/9
Y1 - 2020/9
N2 - The criteria for evaluating a crowdfunding project vary from person to person. Some investors are concerned with the entrepreneurs' profiles, while others are more interested in the creativity behind the project or the idea. Most investors evaluate a project by referring to founder-generated content. Entrepreneurs then face the choice of emphasizing their own profiles or the project creativity within the limited narrative. Our study is thus motivated to examine how the emphasis of the text narratives affect the fundraising outcomes. We propose an improved deep learning model for text content emphasis (TCE) detection from various textual sources, including titles, blurbs, and detailed descriptions, and then estimate the impact of TCE on the success of fundraising campaigns. With data collected from public sources of Kickstarter platform, our empirical analyses demonstrate that TCE matters differently for various textual sources. It is more effective for the title and blurb to emphasize the entrepreneur profile, while the detailed description should highlight the idea creativity. Furthermore, for the detailed description, the entrepreneur profile has a more positive effect when it is placed at the beginning of the narrative. And the effects of entrepreneur-oriented narratives are more pronounced in these projects with more social connections. This study contributes to the understanding of TCE, entrepreneur profile disclosure, and social connection in economic exchanges in online crowdfunding.
AB - The criteria for evaluating a crowdfunding project vary from person to person. Some investors are concerned with the entrepreneurs' profiles, while others are more interested in the creativity behind the project or the idea. Most investors evaluate a project by referring to founder-generated content. Entrepreneurs then face the choice of emphasizing their own profiles or the project creativity within the limited narrative. Our study is thus motivated to examine how the emphasis of the text narratives affect the fundraising outcomes. We propose an improved deep learning model for text content emphasis (TCE) detection from various textual sources, including titles, blurbs, and detailed descriptions, and then estimate the impact of TCE on the success of fundraising campaigns. With data collected from public sources of Kickstarter platform, our empirical analyses demonstrate that TCE matters differently for various textual sources. It is more effective for the title and blurb to emphasize the entrepreneur profile, while the detailed description should highlight the idea creativity. Furthermore, for the detailed description, the entrepreneur profile has a more positive effect when it is placed at the beginning of the narrative. And the effects of entrepreneur-oriented narratives are more pronounced in these projects with more social connections. This study contributes to the understanding of TCE, entrepreneur profile disclosure, and social connection in economic exchanges in online crowdfunding.
KW - Crowdfunding
KW - Investment willingness
KW - Text analytics
KW - Text content emphasis
KW - deep learning
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UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85087081532&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.dss.2020.113341
DO - 10.1016/j.dss.2020.113341
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85087081532
VL - 136
JO - Decision Support Systems
JF - Decision Support Systems
SN - 0167-9236
M1 - 113341
ER -