earticle

영어

The emergence of micro-financing technology significantly impacts the way of supporting an innovative product or service. Lead users, also known as early adopters, have contributed to boosting up immature but potential ideas by purchasing minority items. The rise of micro-financing has been a game changer in terms of lending seed money, marketing products or services with weak brand power, and voluntarily participating in a coproduction process. Crowdfunding refers to a practical business model that achieves benefits of micro-financing approaches mostly initiated by information and communication technologies. This new and powerful online service model is producing significant values by linking investors and innovators efficiently and effectively. The act of buying to support innovation becomes incrementally substituted by the act of being rewarded by evaluating and financing ideas. The fact that a crowdfunding project targets to produce not- yet-matured or not-yet-seen items may increase uncertainty significantly. Compared to the support-to-buy approach, crowdfunding participants have lack of 3rd party views on product performance or service quality. Before a real outcome is shared by lead users, it is probably impossible for following-up supporters to reduce risks due to limit of information. In this study, we targets to uncover the impact of increasing fitness to identity information and a cause of innovation support on the intention of investment in the context of reward-based crowdfunding. Primarily based on Cognitive Fit Theory, the proposed research model aims to examine the influence of fit between information quality and a perceived investment cause on investment intention. In this study we especially focus on two main causes: being involved in the coproduction of innovative product, donating petty money to help an inventor or an entrepreneur. We manipulated real-world projects to generate different levels of founder's explanation relating to project descriptions and founder's identity and expertise. The results of laboratory experiments showed that founder’s explanation for the reason why the project should be supported by the description with video clips, pictures and/or textual narrations would increase understandability and reliability to the project. Meanwhile, a precise and persuasive identification about a project founder enhanced a project’s cause. The findings in this study contributes to the stream of theory development in that we extended Cognitive Fit Theory to the context of crowdfunding. Secondly, we considered different causes for participating in a crowdfunding project, which has not been highlighted. The positive findings from this novel approach reveal that a crowdfunding platform should provide more customization features to help users discover projects that are fitted into different causes conveniently.