The effect of a founder’s past behavior in crowdfunding on the consequence of funding.

Abstract

Previous studies on crowdfunding examined the effects of project’s contents and presentation on success or failure of funding. Since Mollick (2014), effects of founder’s social capital also have attracted much interests. Their considerations are limited to founder’s direct relations (1st sphere) meaning ‘friends’ who a founder backed or was backed by in the past, and doesn’t pay attentions to founder’s indirect relations (2nd sphere), that is, ‘friends of friends.’ Then, we observed all the relations (1st and 2nd sphere) inside Readyfor, Japanese largest site, with web scraping. Using the data, we made regression analysis by setting the relations as explanatory variables and the success/failure and number of backers as dependent variables. As results, we found that more backers founder X had, more likely X succeeds, and that more backers had a founder who founder X interacted with, more likely X succeeds.