Does more crowd participation bring more value to crowdfunding projects? The perspective of crowd capital

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to focus on investigating the impact of crowd participation on degree of project success, which is defined as the total amount of funds a project can obtain after it reaches its initial funding goal threshold. Design/methodology/approach: Drawing on the theory of crowd capital, this study develops six hypotheses about the impact of crowd capability of a fundraiser (i.e. project updates, goal setting, reward levels and social media usage) and crowd participation (i.e. namely, funds pledge and on-site communication) on degree of project success. The hypotheses are tested using data sets of successful projects collected from two popular crowdfunding website..