The Impact Of Image Information On Donation Behavior

Since network has lots of advantages,such as convenient information spreading,safe payment technology,transparent donation environment,it has provided a new direction for charity works.Nowadays,the number of people to participate in network donation and the amount of donation increased significantly.The way to donate has changed from individual to organization through official website to individual to individual through crowd funding and platform.People prefer to donate money to certain persons in demand,and charitable P2P platform has becoming an important approach that people take into consideration,because it has the following advantages,complete information,low risk and high utilization rate of capital(our paper has regarded charitable P2P platform project sponsor/donee as borrower,lender as donor).Therefore,how to elevate donors' experiences and feelings during their donation process and improve charitable P2P platforms'operation performance has becoming a crucial academic issue.In the field of charitable donation,since photos can trigger donors' emotional resonances,charities often use photos to help victims to bring about donors' more pro-social behaviors.However,the current researches mostly use qualitative research methods,to explore whether the characteristics of borrowers that displayed on the photos trigger different donation behavior,lack the operationalization of the dimensions of image information,and combined with the donors' factors and explore its impact on the donation behavior.As a result,our paper has combined Query By Image Content technology and divided image information into four dimensions,they are color features,texture features,shape features and information-entropy,to measure image information that provided by charitable P2P platforms,borrowers.We collected our field data through the most typical charitable P2P platform over the world,KIVA,from October,2014 to May,2016,combine borrowers' elements and donators' elements,verify the role of borrows' characteristics,and analyze the concrete mechanism of donor's subjective consciousness's and image information' influence on donation behavior.Our paper have drawn the following conclusions:Firstly,the color features,shape features,and information-entropy would influence donators,donation behavior;secondly,donor trust significantly adjust the relationship between the image information and the donation behavior;thirdly,we have the verified that characteristics of borrowers affect donation behaviors,the projects sponsored by borrowers of different gender and age get different attention from lenders.Our paper have adopted Query By Image Content technology innovatively,and measured image information that displayed in the charitable P2P platform,constituted a complete framework for image information,opened up a new direction in the research of charitable P2P platform image information.Besides verify the influence of borrowers' characteristics,take the two factors,borrowers and donors,into consideration,analyze the specific influential mechanism of donors' subjective consciousness and the image information on donation behavior deeply,discuss the influence of the image information that provided by charitable P2P platforms'borrowers on donation behavior in detail,therefore,our paper has certain theoretical contributions.Lastly,our paper put forward a serious of practical guidance for the charitable P2P platforms' management practice.