Abstract

Crowdfunding project founders increasingly rely on reward-based platforms to raise capital for their projects. However, the low success rate of reward-based project campaigns remains a concern for many project founders and platform managers. Prior studies investigating participants’ motivations have only focused on either the founders’ or the backers’ perspective, and little research has examined the joint effects of the founders’ and backers’ motivations. Drawing on the theory of basic human values, we assert that founders and backers are strategic about their motivations for engaging in crowdfunding campaigns. We identify four basic human values - self-transcendence, self-enhancement, openness to change, and conservation - that may reveal their intrinsic motivations and investigate how the degree of congruence between founders and backers regarding these values can influence campaign success. Using data from Kickstarter, we first extract evidence of these four values from the founder’s project description and backers’ comments for each project and empirically test a moderated model of reward-based crowdfunding success. The findings indicate that congruences in the openness to change, self-transcendence, and conservation values between founders and backers positively relate to project campaign success, but these relationships weaken when the congruence becomes excessive. However, self-enhancement value congruence between the founders and backers can consistently maintain a stable positive influence on project campaign success. Furthermore, linguistic conformity is positively related to the campaign outcomes but reduces the distinctiveness of the congruence effects related to self-transcendence and openness to change. The study’s findings contribute to the value congruence literature and provide insights on how to improve the chances of project success in reward-based crowdfunding.

DOI

10.17705/1jais.00924

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