Crowdfunding for technology start-ups : Investigating the interplay among technology, beneficiary and patron

Abstract

Thousands of technology start-ups across the globe are using reward-based crowdfunding to get financial support from technophilic patrons. While there is plenty of literature on antecedents of overall campaign success for general crowdfunding, there are hardly any studies on individual contribution factors, and nothing related to the technology context. In this paper, we study how certain broad technology characteristics can not only influence patron contribution behavior directly, but also indirectly through various aspects of beneficiary behavior (aspiration, communication, presentation, interaction) and peer group behavior (contribution, enthusiasm, interaction). To that end we estimated a system of equations with correlated error terms using Seemingly Unrelated Regression model on crowdfunding data from Kickstarter.com to find out the statistical significance and amount of influence exerted by the independent variables of each equation on the respective dependent variables. The results not only help in making certain fundamental theoretical contributions to this domain, but the relative importance of the factors identified in this study could also be practically used by the