Research On The Influence Of Social Capital On The Product Crowdfunding Performance

Enterprise is an important force to promote the development of national economy, the government have been advocating public entrepreneurship, innovation, but the venture enterprises generally face the problems of the shortage of resources and accessing resources difficultly, the entrepreneur’s social capital often play an important role in the process of acquiring resources, a large number of scholars have studied the important role of social capital to entrepreneurial resources acquisition. In the context of the Internet era, crowdfunding platform provides enterprises a new channel to access to capital, technology, channels, suppliers and other resources, then in crowdfunding platform, whether social capital still affect resources acquisition performance, studies have analyzed the relationship between project sponsor’s individual social capital and resources acquisition performance, yet, there are few research about how social capital on crowdfunding platform affects product crowdfunding performance, which is this paper to study deeply.Based on social capital theory, combined with 320 data collected from crowdfunding platform Demohour, this paper analysis how structure dimension, relational dimension and cognitive dimension of social capital on crowdfunding platform influence product crowdfunding performance, and whether online word of mouth moderates the relationship between social capital and product crowdfunding performance, because of limited research data and the characteristic of crowdfunding platform, this study only analysis the network contact of structural dimension, mutual benefit of relationship dimension, shared meaning of cognitive dimension. For the measurement of each variable, this paper respectively use the number of fans and topics to measure network contact, support numbers to measure reciprocity, and text and picture numbers to measure shared meaning, evaluation scores to measure online word of mouth, actual financing amount/target financing amount to measure raise performance. Based on the existing theory, this paper proposes that the number of fans, topics, supports, pictures and texts are positive influence crowdfunding performance and online word-of-mouth positive moderates the relationship between social capital and product crowdfunding performance.This paper draws the following conclusions:(1)The number of fans, topics, texts, pictures have positive impact on product crowdfunding performance.(2)The number of support have no effect on crowdfunding performance.(3)Online word of mouth positively regulates the relationship between the number of fans, topics, pictures, texts and product crowdfunding performance.This study not only enriches quantitative measurement of social capital and social capital theory, also enriches crowdfunding research model, empirical research method,crowdfunding research theory. In addition, this paper also has certain guiding significance to crowdfunding project initiators,they should not only pay attention to the establishment of individual social capital, also need to build and maintain social capital embedded on crowfunding platform.