“Fund me, I am fabulous!” Do narcissistic entrepreneurs succeed or fail in crowdfunding?

Abstract

In this paper, we extend the nascent literature interested in understanding the role of narcissism in determining resource acquisition by entrepreneurs. Using a sample of 59,538 crowdfunding campaigns launched by individual entrepreneurs on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter and adopting an unobtrusive measure of narcissism derived from the literature, we demonstrate that a negative relation exists between narcissism and crowdfunding success: the greater the entrepreneur's narcissistic personality, the lower the probability s/he succeeds in funding her/his crowdfunding campaign. Nevertheless, this relation changes depending on the entrepreneurial context in which the entrepreneur sets her/his crowdfunding campaign.