New product crowdfunding has become an emerging method for start-ups to finance their innovative ideas. Since driving participants’ engagement is crucial to successful fundraising, it is important to study the factors that affect participants’ motivation to back the crowdfunding projects. In this paper, we first examine the impact of goal proximity on backing motivation and then we focus on investigating how group size affects perceived personal impact and resulting motivation to back a project. To test our hypotheses, we collected backing records and creativity ratings of smart wearables projects from a crowdfunding platform in China−Demohour.com. We used daily backers added as our dependent variable to capture potential backers’ motivation to back a project and modeled it using a negative binomial model with project and time fixed effects. Our empirical analyses suggest the following. First, consistent with existing research on the goal gradient effect, the funding ratio of a project is positively related to daily backers added while the positive effect becomes insignificant after reaching 100% funding ratio. Second, group size of backers has a negative effect on potential backers’ motivation. We explain that this is because individuals exert less effort due to decreased perceived personal impact when group size grows (social loafing effect) (Karau & Williams, 1993). Finally, creativity negatively moderates the effect of group size on backing motivation that the negative effect of group size especially calls for attention when the creativity level of the project is high.

• Meixiang Cui(Yonsei University, Republic of Korea)
• Jeonghye Choi(Yonsei University, Republic of Korea)
• Jaeyoung Lee(Yonsei University, Republic of Korea)
• Subin Im(Yonsei University, Republic of Korea)