Research On The Crowd Investment Motivation,Influence Mechanism And Investment Dicision Of Equity Crowdfunding

Equity crowdfunding is a directing financial approach whereby an entrepreneur sells equity or equity-like shares of a company to the crowd through an open call for funding on Internet-based platforms.The crowd invest relatively small amounts of money with receiving an interest in the form of equity,equity-like arrangements or profit-sharing in the ventures they fund.The essence of equity crowdfunding is an investment contract in the form of shares,equity-like instruments or shareholding contract between the crowd and the venture.The rapid development of equity crowdfunding provides funding for medium,small and micro-sized enterprises,and injects exuberant vitality into entrepreneurial and innovation activity,accommodating to the multi-level investment needs.It is noteworthy that the crowd of equity crowdfunding is small investors,who are likely to lack the financial sophistication and experience.Furthermore,relative to their investments,the costs for evaluating the due diligence of a start-up investment is no economic sense.Besides the success probability of start-ups is much lower,the information asymmetry of equity crowdfunding is amplified due to the negative influence of internet-besed anonymous effect,which injects more uncertainty into the equity crowdfunding market.Therefore,in the context that equity crowdfunding regulatory rules in our country has not yet been released,this paper summaries the investment model of equity crowdfunding,and deeply studies the investment motivation,investment influence mechanism as well as investment decision of equity crowdfunding from the crowd perspective.The main research work of this paper is as follows:Firstly,according to the operation situation of equity crowdfunding platforms in domestic and overseas,this paper studies the investment model in three aspects including ownership,return and exit.Taking Wefunder,Crowdcube,AngleList as an example,this paper systematically and comprehensively analyzes the difference among investment process,ownership,return and exit in different investment patterns,enriching the research in the field of equity crowdfunding.Secondly,this paper builds the crowd investment motivation model of equity crowdfunding,recognizing the type and effect of intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation,as well as exploring the moderating effect of extrinsic motivation between intrinsic motivation and the decision to pledge.Results shows that: regarding to intrinsic motivation,trust-based help motivation and community motivation all have significant positive influence on the decision to pledge,expect support motivation;regarding to extrinsic motivation,rewards motivation has significant negative influence on the decision to pledge,and the effect of economic returns is not significant;economic returns motivation and rewards motivation all have significant positive influence on the relationship of trust-based help motivation and the decision to pledge as well as on the relationship of community motivation and the decision to pledge,but all have no moderating effect on the relationship of support motivation and the decision to pledge.Thirdly,this paper constructs the crowd investment influence mechanism model of equity crowdfunding,explores the signal transduction process among entrepreneurs,lead investors and funders,as well as testing the mediating effect of lead investor between uncertainty and investment scale.The results reveal that: a negative and significant relation between equity offering and investment amount;the positive effect of project valuation on investment amount;lead amount has mediating effect on the relationship of equity offering and investment amount,as well as the relationship of project valuation and investment amount.Fourthly,this paper establishes a decision index system depending on equity crowdfunding project and financer two dimensions,using the exploratory factor analysis,nonparametric test,binary-logistic regression analysis and neural network model to identify the key and effective indictors.The results reveal that: the key and effective indicators of project dimension are duration,videos,project updates,project ratings,patents;as well as the number of employees and business period of enterprise dimension;there also exists interaction effect between videos and productive certificate materials.