Title: Effect of the crowdfunding description on investment decisions from the perspective of prosocial behaviour

Authors: Yonghui Dai; Tao Wang; Ziyi Wang; Bo Xu

Addresses: Management School, Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, Shanghai, 201620, China ' School of Information Management and Engineering, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, 200433, China ' School of Humanities, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, 200433, China ' Management School, Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, Shanghai, 201620, China

Abstract: Alleviating poverty is a global challenge and requires extensive mobilisation of the participation from every social force. A feasible way for alleviating poverty is the crowdfunding through the internet, which could receive financial aid from a number of people all over the world for some reasonable projects released online officially. This work argues that prosocial behaviour can increase the possibilities of achieving projects' fundraising goals. Based on the prosocial behaviour theory, this work analyses the prosocial factors from the poverty alleviation projects' textual data published on an international crowdfunding platform, Kiva, and establish the logit model to test and verify the feasibility of these factors. The results show that the fundraiser identity and fundraising project orientation in the crowdfunding description both play critical roles in the financial funding process.

Keywords: poverty alleviation; crowdfunding; prosocial behaviour; investment decisions.

DOI: 10.1504/IJES.2020.110672

International Journal of Embedded Systems, 2020 Vol.13 No.4, pp.476 - 484

Received: 05 Dec 2019
Accepted: 10 Jan 2020
Published online: 27 Oct 2020 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article