Abstract

Crowdfunding has emerged as a vital means of financing entrepreneurial, creative, and social initiatives. Unlike traditional funding models that rely on institutional investors or financial intermediaries, crowdfunding platforms connect creators directly with a broad audience of potential backers. However, this funding model also amplifies information asymmetries. Unlike institutional investors who can conduct thorough due diligence and have access to detailed financial records and direct interactions, individual backers must make funding decisions with limited online information. Because of this heightened uncertainty, backers would draw on every available signal, such as facial cues of credibility, trustworthiness, and competence from the creator, to justify their funding decisions. Prior studies on crowdfunding have extensively examined campaign narratives, funding goals, and social proof, however, little is known about the role of creators’ visual self-presentation. Profile images often constitute backers’ first and often only direct encounter with creators. Facial cues can instantly convey warmth, competence, trustworthiness, or uncertainty. In crowdfunding’s high-stakes, low-information environment, where backers must evaluate strangers’ projects with minimal interaction, these subtle visual signals may exert outsized influence on funding success. Drawing on signaling theory, we conduct an empirical analysis using a dataset of more than 130,000 Kickstarter projects launched between 2009 and 2020. To ensure consistency, we restrict our analysis to projects whose profile images contain a single detectable face with sex that can be reliably identified. Using computer vision techniques, we extracted measures of creators’ facial expressions, including happiness, fear, anger, and smile intensity, and merged these with project-level metadata such as funding goals, campaign size, and staff endorsements. Our findings demonstrate that emotional signals play a central role in shaping crowdfunding outcomes. Positive expressions, such as smiling and happiness, can significantly increase backer participation, while negative emotions like fear and anger reduce support. This pattern indicates that backers are highly sensitive to visual cues that signal enthusiasm versus uncertainty or hostility. The impact of emotional expressions also varies with project scale. Larger projects benefit more from positive expressions, consistent with persuasive signals becoming more critical when funding thresholds are higher. Platform endorsements introduce an unexpected moderating effect on these dynamics. For endorsed projects, the returns to positive expressions are diminished, suggesting that platform credibility partially substitutes for emotional persuasion. However, negative emotions penalize all projects equally, regardless of endorsement status. This asymmetric effect likely occurs because cues of fear or hostility directly undermine perceptions of trustworthiness, a fundamental concern that even official endorsements cannot fully mitigate. In summary, our study extends signaling theory by demonstrating that emotional cues function as credible signals whose impacts vary with project size and platform endorsement. Positive emotions enhance credibility and can partially substitute for platform endorsement, whereas negative emotions generate non-compensable trust deficits that cannot be mitigated by platform credibility. Our findings also provide actionable insights for crowdfunding practice by showing that creators’ emotional cues significantly influence funding outcomes. Campaign creators should prioritize positive emotional displays, particularly in large-scale projects. In addition, creators should avoid negative emotions as the detrimental effects of negative emotions cannot be offset by platform endorsement.

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