Research On The Influence Mechanism And Prediction Method Of Individual Social Capital On Crowdfunding Performance

In recent years,crowdfunding has gradually become a popular fund-raising channel for entrepreneurs and individuals due to its convenience.It is crucial for the platforms and the fundraisers to figure out what factors influence the performance of crowdfunding campaign and further predict the crowdfunding performance.In this paper,we pay special attention to the effects of social capital in crowdfunding.Specifically,we first explore the effects of social capital on crowdfunding performance through an empirical study based on the large-scale real-world dataset with 103,582 campaigns collected from Indiegogo.The empirical results suggest that social capital has remarkable influence on crowdfunding performance.Some interesting findings are indicated.For example,the crowdfunding campaigns launched by campaign owners with more Facebook friends and more team members are more likely to reach their fundraising goals;Validating email is beneficial to raising money,while validating Facebook or Linked In has a negative impact on crowdfunding performance;The campaign owners’ comments on other people’s campaigns contribute to the crowdfunding performance of his own campaigns;The longer descriptions about campaigns improve the crowdfunding performance,but the longer descriptions about campaign owners worsen the crowdfunding performance;The active and conscientious responses of campaign owners to the comments of backers have a positive impact on the crowdfunding performance;In addition,we deeply test the moderating effects of campaign category to enrich the studies about social capital and crowdfunding.Then we further develop a prediction method for crowdfunding performance from the perspective of social capital.The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our social capital-based prediction model.It is indicated that among all the social capital related variables,project＿description＿length is the most important variable to predict the crowdfunding performance.Our results contribute to previous literature about both the effects of social capital in Internet financial investment and the prediction method for crowdfunding performance.