The Determinants Of Reward-based Crowdfunding Project Delivery Performance

Crowdfunding refers to the act of raising funds from the masses to support the initiated individuals or organizations,with low thresholds,diversity,and reliance on the power of the public,which generally consist of sponsors,investors,and platforms.Since the beginning of the 21 st century,crowdfunding has developed rapidly as a potential disruptive financing method.At the age of social networks,it has become an increasingly important financing method for entrepreneurs or small businesses.At the crossroad of micro-finance and social networks,crowdfunding is undergoing intense scrutiny from scholars and policymakers to understand where it positions in the chain of start-up funding.Currently the most popular of all crowdfunding models is Reward-based crowdfunding projects.As a new type of entrepreneurial financing model,in Rewardbased crowdfunding projects,investors will not directly receive cash returns from investment,but receive non-monetary rewards.At the same time,the funders expect the project owners to deliver the promised rewards within the specified delivery time.Previous studies examined various factors such as level and amount of funding received,project category and size and project durations that might influence the reward delivery performance.However,textual information of projects has rarely been studied for analyzing on time or late delivery.The main contribution of this research is to apply a text analysis framework to extract the factors that can affect the project's reward delivery from the latent semantics of the project text description,and form a configuration model to analyze and predict reward delivery performance through qualitative comparative analysis(QCA).This thesis validates the proposed model by using the real-world data collected from the largest crowdfunding platform in the world,kickstart(https://www.kickstarter.com).In total,this thesis collected 690 successful reward-based crowdfunding projects under eight categories from 2012 to 2018.This research used the Latent Dirichlet Allocation(LDA)topic model to effectively extract the topic features in the project description file,obtained the antecedent factors(including project team experience,project promised leading time,sourcing approach and production approach)to form the configuration model,and conducted(QCA)for the antecedent factors.The findings indicate that the configurational models have high consistency and coverage,which are sufficient antecedent conditions for on-time and late delivery.Through analysis,when the project sponsor adopts proactive sourcing approach,an appropriate lead time should be set to ensure that the rewards are delivered on time during the implementation phase.Conversely,when adopting post campaign sourcing approach,project sponsors can consider combining multiple production methods to minimize the cost while ensuring timely delivery of rewards.The asymmetric analysis of this study also confirms that the complexity theory can be properly applied in the field of crowdfunding.The research shows that the approaches for on-time reward delivery performance are unique and not mirror opposites of those applied in late reward delivery performance.This has further enlightenment for the stakeholders of crowdfunding,and provides ideas for how to set an appropriate lead time and choose a suitable production method to achieve on-time delivery.The study also explored the management ideas of the reward-based crowdfunding project platform,and provided rational suggestions for the managers and operators of the reward-based crowdfunding project platform.Platform managers should encourage project sponsors to develop detailed delivery plans at the beginning of the project,which will help managers to control the quality of platform projects and help investors determine the project risk.Finally,the limitations of this study and the prospects for future research are pointed out.