An important barrier to commercializing innovations is the availability of early-stage funding. Given the difficulties that new ventures face in attracting financing from angel investors, banks and venture capital funds, some entrepreneurs are tapping into large, online communities of...

Entrepreneurs are turning to crowdfunding as a way to finance their creative ideas. Crowdfunding involves relatively small contributions of many consumer-investors over a fixed time period (generally a few weeks). The purpose of this paper is to add to our empirical understanding of backer...