| Crowdfunding refers to “the efforts by entrepreneurial individuals and groups – cultural,social,and for-profit – to fund their ventures by drawing on relatively small contributions from a relatively large number of individuals using the internet,without standard financial intermediaries.Several participants influence crowdfunding in different ways by creating an ecosystem,which include creators,backers,crowdfunding websites and regulations.Moreover,understanding who the actors are in the crowdfunding space is important to understanding how crowdfunding works.Some studies have investigated behavior of backers in crowdfunding and the results reveal that because of peer influence,potential backers are affected by existed contribution information that made by prior backers.Several backers' behaviors have been found,such as home bias behavior,herding behavior and information hiding behavior.However,all these researches just paid attention to backers,ignoring influence of creators on potential backers' decision,which will be impossible to understanding the whole crowdfunding ecosystem completely and systematically.Creator is the one who initialized crowdfunding projects,and they are not the same group with backers,namely they are not peer to each other.Therefore,the influence of creators' behavior on potential backers' decision cannot be explained by peer influence.Based on the gap of existed researches,this paper proceeds from an interesting behavior of creators on crowdfunding websites----free riding behavior,and try to uncover the influence of creators' free riding behavior on potential backers' decision.This paper proposed that creators' free riding behavior affected backers' investment intention because of awareness effect.Panel data consisted of 5388 projects from zhongchou.com were collected and analyzed.We study the influence of creators' active free riding and been free rided on potential backers decision.Here are some conclusions:(1)There are two kinds of creators ‘active free riding' behavior,frequent ones and explosive ones,while ‘been free rided' is just one long and steady type.Frequent ones mean that some creators behave the active free riding behavior during the whole process frequently while the others' behavior focus on a few days explosively(more than 50 times a day).Long and steady ‘free rided' behavior refers to projects are been free rided by other projects several times a day(less than 10 times a day).What's more,we found that free riding and free rided are positively associated with each other.(2)Creators' free riding behavior on the day influence potential backers decision positively and accumulative free riding has no impact on contribution of projects.To be specific,Creators' free riding in the same category projects affect contribution positively and in different category has no effect,which is consistent with accumulative free riding no matter same or different category.In addition,we found that influence of creators' free riding on the day in same category projects on contribution has a marginal effect of 3%.(3)Accumulative free rided have a negative effect on potential backers decision while been free rided on the day influence contribution positively.To be specific,accumulative free rided(no matter in the same category or different ones)has a negative association with contribution,and accumulative free rided in the same category has a marginal effect of 3% and accumulative free ridedin different category peojects is 4%.However,been free rided on the day has a positive relationship with contribution surprisingly. |
PDF Full Text Request