This paper presents a first-ever empirical examination of the effectiveness of signals that entrepreneurs use to induce (small) investors to commit financial resources in an equity crowdfunding context. We examine the impact of venture quality (human capital, social (alliance) capital, and...

Crowdfunding has mostly been used to finance very unique projects. Recently, however, companies have begun using it to finance more traditional products where they compete against other sellers of similar products. Major crowdfunding platforms, Kickstarter and Indiegogo, as well as Amazon have...

Established early stage investors decide to invest in new ventures after evaluating the propensity of success and the risk of failure. Consequently, it is of considerable importance that the new business owners have substantial 'skin in the game' and are thus highly committed to business...

This study investigates signal validity in equity-based crowdfunding by examining whether signals that increase crowd participation are associated with higher post-offering success. Post-offering success is measured as the probability of survival. We use a hand-collected data set of 88 campaigns...

This paper presents an initial empirical examination of which start-up signals will induce small investors to commit financial resources in an equity crowdfunding context. We examine the impact of firms' financial roadmaps (e.g., preplanned exit strategies such as IPOs or acquisitions), external...

This paper presents a first-ever empirical examination of the effectiveness of signals that entrepreneurs use to induce (small) investors to commit financial resources in an equity crowdfunding context. We examine the impact of venture quality (human capital, social (alliance) capital, and...

We use hand-collected data of 20,460 investment decisions and two distinct portals to analyze whether investors in equity crowdfunding direct their investments to local firms. In line with agency theory, the results suggest that investors exhibit a local bias, even when we control for family and...

Crowdfunding platforms have exhibited explosive growth over the past decade. In this paper, we map out what we know about crowdfunding, and chart directions for future work. We argue the crowdfunding literature simultaneously experiences the ‘problem of riches' and the ‘dearth of evidence'....

Equity crowdfunding (ECF) provides outside equity to unlisted and mainly early stage entrepreneurial firms and the UK is the leading ECF market. This paper investigates the determinants of first follow-on campaigns and of their probability of success for a sample of 790 firms that conducted an...

Equity crowdfunding (ECF) provides outside equity to unlisted and mainly early stage entrepreneurial firms and the UK is the leading ECF market. This paper investigates the determinants of first follow-on campaigns and of their probability of success for a sample of 790 firms that conducted an...