| As a new driving force of economic development,platform economy plays an important role in optimizing resource allocation and promoting mass entrepreneurship and innovation.As an emerging component of the platform economy,crowdfunding platforms have received widespread attention from academia and industry.Among them,reward-based crowdfunding refers to a funding model in which the project creators raise funds from many investors to realize their financing needs and provide tangible products or intangible services without sacrificing the company’s equity in return for investment.Reward-based crowdfunding has become the mainstream of the crowdfunding industry due to its flexible operation mode,low funding threshold and high product creativity,and is also an important and effective channel for SMEs and individual entrepreneurs to realize their business dreams and meet their capital needs.Investors in reward-based crowdfunding platforms are important participants in all stages of crowdfunding activities,and their behavior on the platform include both investment behavior of providing financial support to project creators and evaluation behavior of providing feedback and building a good platform ecosystem.However,investors on reward-based crowdfunding platforms are at an information disadvantage compared to project creators due to the lack of information and expertise related to project quality.In terms of management practices,project creators focus on how to reduce information asymmetry to attract investors and thus improve crowdfunding performance and build a good reputation in the platform.From the existing studies,many scholars have explored the impact of quality signals on investors’ behavior based on signaling theory,but the existing studies have not fully considered the key factor of signal environment emphasized by signaling theory and lacked an overall focus on the whole project life cycle.In summary,the limitations of the existing studies are mainly in three aspects:(1)the boundary conditions of the effect of quality signals on investor behavior in reward-based crowdfunding platforms have not been fully tested;(2)different views emerge from the findings on the impact of quality signals on investor behavior in reward-based crowdfunding projects;and(3)the impact of quality signals on investor evaluation behavior in the execution stage of reward-based crowdfunding projects has not received sufficient attention.To remedy the limitations in the existing literature,this paper explores the impact of quality signals on investor behavior(including investment behavior and evaluation behavior)and whether the reward-based crowdfunding platform environment serves as a boundary condition for quality signals to function.Grounded on the information asymmetry scenario of the reward-based crowdfunding platform,the author choose signaling theory as the core theoretical foundation.The author conducted three sub-studies to investigate the impact of quality signals on investors’ investment behavior in a static perspective,the impact of quality signals on investors’ investment behavior in a dynamic perspective,and the impact of quality signals on investors’ evaluation behavior in reward-based crowdfunding platform environment,respectively.Details of the study are as follows.First,sub-study 1 analyzes the impact of quality signals on investor investment behavior in the fundraising stage from a static perspective and considers the moderating role of platform competition intensity and platform demand potential in the platform.The results show that heuristic cues have positive effect on fundraising performance as quality signals,and that the platform environment is the boundary condition for the signals to work,i.e.,platform competition intensity constituted by the competition behavior of project creators can weaken the positive effect of quality signals on fundraising performance,while platform demand potential constituted by the investment behavior of investors can enhance the positive effect of quality signals on fundraising performance.Second,sub-study 2 analyzes the impact of quality signals on investors’ investment behavior during the fundraising phase from a dynamic perspective,while considering the moderating role of platform competition intensity and information disclosure in the reward-based crowdfunding platform environment.Sub-study 2 focuses on the dynamic factors that emerge during the fundraising process,i.e.,the previous funding level and the changing reward-based crowdfunding platform environment as the project’s fundraising progress changes.The author construct an unbalanced panel dataset using daily transaction data of crowdfunding projects and use a fixed-effects model to analyze the influence of quality signals,i.e.,previous funding level,on the next-day funding performance of projects from a dynamic perspective,and to verify the moderating role of the platform environment.Sub-study 2 finds that the previous funding level acts as a quality signal for next-day funding performance at low values,and suppress next-day funding performance after reaching a certain level.Taken together,an inverted U-shaped relationship between previous funding level and nextday fundraising performance is observed,while the platform competition intensity weakens the inverted U-shaped relationship.There is heterogeneity in the moderating effect of information disclosure generated by different dominant players,i.e.,creatorled information updates enhance the inverted U-shaped relationship while investor-led interactive messages weaken the relationship.Finally,sub-study 3 focuses on the effect of quality signals on investor evaluation behavior during the project execution phase from a project life cycle perspective,while considering the moderating effects of platform competition intensity,platform demand potential,and information updates in platform environment.Combining ideas from signaling theory and other perspectives,sub-study 3 hypothesizes that project fundraising performance as a quality signal will effectively promote investor evaluation behavior.The empirical test results show that fundraising performance can act as a quality signal to promote investors to implement value co-creation behaviors and enhance investor satisfaction.Meanwhile,platform competition intensity can enhance the positive effect of fundraising performance on value co-creation,while platform demand potential and information updates can weaken the effect of fundraising performance on value co-creation.Conversely,platform demand potential and information updates enhance the effect of fundraising performance on investor satisfaction.In summary,this study shows that in reward-based crowdfunding platform with information asymmetry,quality signals have a significant impact on both investors’investment behavior and evaluation behavior.Meanwhile,the relevant platform environment constituted by creators’ and investors’ behavior functions as a boundary condition for quality signals to influence investors’ behavior.The main innovation of this paper is to explore the variability of the influence of quality signal on investor behavior in various platform environments from different perspectives based on the unique attributes of reward-based crowdfunding platform.The study remedies the limitations of existing studies that have not paid enough attention to the signaling environment emphasized by signaling theory,and explores the heterogeneity of the moderating role of the platform environment constituted by investor and creator behavior in platform.The findings also provide management insights on how crowdfunding projects’ creators can optimize the performance of the whole life cycle process of crowdfunding activities and how platform managers can guide relevant participants to build a good platform ecosystem. |
