Benefited by the increased digital footprints visibility and prevalence of various online platforms (i.e., crowdfunding and social media), I leveraged a unique, large, and nuanced data set, which contains both individual level crowdfunding actions (i.e., funding/promoting) and social network structures and behaviors to investigate the role of online friends and intermediate project promoters on crowdfunding success.

In the first study, I focused on the role of project initiator’s online friends as sources of funding, and further investigated how and through what mechanism the social relationships between project initiators and their online friends affect the latter’s funding decision. Through the relational lens, the empirical results suggest that both tie strength and embeddedn...[ Read more ]

Benefited by the increased digital footprints visibility and prevalence of various online platforms (i.e., crowdfunding and social media), I leveraged a unique, large, and nuanced data set, which contains both individual level crowdfunding actions (i.e., funding/promoting) and social network structures and behaviors to investigate the role of online friends and intermediate project promoters on crowdfunding success.

In the first study, I focused on the role of project initiator’s online friends as sources of funding, and further investigated how and through what mechanism the social relationships between project initiators and their online friends affect the latter’s funding decision. Through the relational lens, the empirical results suggest that both tie strength and embeddedness mitigate different types of crowdfunding uncertainty that discourage funding, and so increase funding likelihood, but through different mechanisms. Tie strength provides online friends with access to personal information about the project initiator (information transfer mechanism); embeddedness affects funding decisions by making online friends feel socially obligated to help the project initiator (obligation mechanism). This study contributes to the crowdfunding and social networks fields.

In the second study, I shifted the focus from the project initiator’s online friends to the project’s promoters, who have utilized the online WOM (i.e., the social sharing function on crowdfunding platform) to promote the project to his/her own networks. The promoter’s behavioral consistency serves as effective signal to encourage backing decision yet depending on the tie strength of initiator-promoter dyad and promoter-recipient dyad. Results show that the weak ties of the project initiator play a more important role in shaping the funding decisions of promoter’s networks but under the condition that they exhibit behavioral consistency; and so do the weak-ties of recipient. This study contributes to online WOM, crowdfunding and quality signaling fields.