Crowdfunding – obtaining funding from a large pool of investors, where each one provides a relatively small amount of money, usually through the Internet – has become an innovative alternative channel for project funding. Historically, culture sector has stood at the forefront of adopting crowdfunding, with ArtistShare active from 2003 as a funding platform for music projects. Despite this, there is still lack of research dedicated to the role and impact of crowdfunding in the culture sector.

The purpose of this research is to examine the impact of firms’ repeated use of crowdfunding on consumer responses and the funding success, focusing on compensatory crowdfunding that provides products and services when funding is successful. The result indicates that the number of crowdfunding round and achievement rates are related to parabolic forms. These results suggest that investors can recognize the number of crowdfunding round as a important signal for crowdfunding investment. In addition, this research aims to present practical implications for crowdfunding firms and platforms to attract ongoing investments.

Crowdfunding is an increasingly popular fundraising tool where project creators solicit capital from potential backers in return for monetary rewards or presales of products/services. Potential backers in crowdfunding are looking for potential cues to reduce uncertainty and predict new venture success when making their capital contributions. To increase their funding success, project creators strategically use project descriptions as a marketing tool to attract potential backers and funding.

Green crowdfunding – fundraising for green initiatives – has become a growing source of alternative finance for sustainable entrepreneurs. The current paper explores the business model of green crowdfunding from three perspectives, i.e. funders, founders and platform. We pay special attention to how green crowdfunding extends consumers‘ involvement in sustainable economy.

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.

Crowdfunding has recently emerged as a novel way for people to collect monetary donation from large numbers of internet users. Since 2009, the volume of crowdfunding has increased exponentially, reaching 16.2 billion in 2014. A growing number of literature starts to investigate social influence in crowdfunding that occurs when former backers, who make contribution to fund a project at an earlier stage of fund-raising period, make influences of the contribution decision of latter backers. Crowdfunding can be classified into four categories, namely, lending-based, equity-based, reward-based, and donation-based. The primary goal of lending-based and equity-based crowdfunding is to raise capital and borrow money from a number of investors or lenders in exchange for interest payment or equity share of a company. In contrast, reward-based crowdfunding or donation-based crowdfunding requires a project initiator to create a project, which raise fund to develop a new product (e.g., private good) or enhance the public interest (e.g., public good). In this study, we focus on the two most popular crowdfunding type: reward-based and donation-based crowdfunding projects. In reward-based crowdfunding, backers (or contributors) give a small amount of money in return for a reward such as a copy of creative work or pre-sell products. In donation-based crowdfunding, backers donate to projects for gratitude and the pleasure of giving and expect no compensation in exchange

This paper aims at analyzing the introduction of crowdfunding science in Korea from a legal point of view. It is composed of three main parts: The first part defines and groups the types of crowdfunding and reviews foreign legal trends on the issue; Second, it narrows down the focus into crowdfunding science and analyzes the most famous funding portals in this field; Third, it deals with the legal issues of donation/reward-based crowdfunding from the perspective of three stakeholders such as researchers, funding portals, and funding portals. From a point of researchers, the Act of Raising Contributions does not fully regulate the behaviors of raising money for research through crowdfunding science in terms of coverage, registration requirement, and limit of rasing contributions. From a point of funding portals, it should clarify the right and the responsibility that they have as internet service providers. In particular, it needs to make it clear when funding portals enjoy safe harbour provisions in spite of intentional unlawful behaviours of researchers. From a point of funding portal, this paper emphasizes on the risk of leaking incomplete technologies by funders, the public. The current laws such as「 Industrial technology leakage prevention act」and「 Unfair competition prevention and trade secret protection act」is not appropriate to protect the technologies that are not fully developed. In conclusion, it is time to consider the way to revise relevant laws to boost crowdfunding science with the donation/reward-based crowdfunding funding portals, which have not gotten attention so far because of the public purpose.

Purpose - A framework is suggested in this paper which will help crowdfunding platforms to match projects according to expectations of funders, leading to successful campaigns and thus increase the profitability of the crowdfunding platform. Research design, data, and methodology – The paper is theoretical and conceptual in nature which proposes a model for crowdfunding platforms to match expectations of crowds with project fundraisers. Results - Crowdfunding platforms are going through incremental innovations in order to match customer (funders and fundraisers) expectations. Leading crowdfunding platforms like Kickstart holds benchmark for other players in the market but the secret of success lies in matching quality projects with the appropriate funders. Crowdfunding platforms have to securitize the projects and allow only quality projects but also provide a wide range of options for funders. Thus, to manage this trade-off between quality and quantity of options, a framework is proposed. Conclusions - Crowdfunding platforms have to adopt a model which will help them in providing a perfect match between crowds and fundraisers. Each member of the crowd and every project will be assigned a category and rating based on the past records. Securitization of projects will help to entertain only demanded projects which will reduce the number of failing campaigns.