earticle

영어

Compared to traditional e-commerce or other Internet-based service, a unique feature of crowdfunding is that crowdfunding projects usually target to produce in-progress (i.e., not-yet-matured or not-yet-seen) items. This feature results in crowdfunding investors are lacking of project related views from prior participants or third-parties. In reality, a project web page is usually the main approach for crowdfunding founders to demonstrate their entrepreneurial ideas. From another perspective, a project online presentation is almost the solely information source for investors to judge the project. The reasons why prospective investors could make decisions based upon such a limited information source may include two aspects: (1) the project presentation per se could be perceived having the capacity to deliver project relevant information that may be helpful for investors to judge the quality of the project; and (2) investors might be confident in their abilities of successfully completing an online investment behavior even though the information they faced is imperfect. Firstly, concerning the capacity of conveying project relevant information, project presentation with various combinations of media types may be different. Information richness of project presentation is employed in this study to describe the extent to which a project presentation with a mixture of various media types (i.e., Text, Text-Image, Text-Video and Text-Image-Video) has the capacity to convey project related information (i.e., project attributes). In line with the Media Richness Theory (MRT), each type of communication medium has a certain level of ability to deliver information cues. Thus, we could reasonably infer that the more types of media applied in a project presentation, the more information cues (i.e., project attributes) might be demonstrated. In other word, a combination of more media types (e.g., Text-Image-Video) used in project presentation is expected to facilitate higher level of information richness, which is expected to be capable of delivering more project attribute information. Further, in order to examine the information relevance and utilization of project presentation for judging the quality of project, perceived diagnosticity is employed in this study. In particular, perceived diagnosticity refers to the extent to which individuals perceive a project presentation having the ability of delivering project relevant information that could assist them in understanding and evaluating the quality of the project. More diagnostic project presentation is expected to have the ability of carrying more project attributes in improving investor’s probability of utilizing the information to assess the project. Except project presentation per se, investor has responsibilities to judge, evaluate and select right actions to accomplish the task of funding online. Investor’s confidence in the ability of accomplishing an online investment is described as computer self-efficacy. Basically, higher level of computer efficacy is expected to have higher confidence of correctly judging a project by analyzing information presented in the project presentation. Additionally, individuals may form overall evaluations of a project after their browsing the project online presentation, which could be recognized as attitudes toward the project. Investors’ favorable attitudes toward a project may enable them to perceive the benefit of investing to the project, which may result in a higher investment intention, and vice versa. Overall, the purpose of this study is to investigate the impacts of information richness and computer efficacy on perceived diagnosticity of project presentation; and further, to examine the extent to which perceived diagnosticity could influence investor’s attitude towards a project and subsequent decision-making. Also, the moderating effects of information richness and computer efficacy on the relation between attitude and investment intention are investigated in this study. Laboratory experiments were used to collect data. 224 subjects were recruited to participate in the experiments. Four levels of information richness of project presentation (i.e., (1) Text (Base condition), (2) Text and Image, (3) Text and Video, and (4) Title, Image and Video) were constructed to test our hypotheses. The experimental results show that (1) compared to a low level of combination of media types, a combination of more media types used in project presentation lead to higher perceived diagnosticity of project presentation; (2) computer self-efficacy exerts positively influence on perceived diagnosticity; (3) perceived diagnosticity of project presentation is a strong predictor of attitude towards a project and investment intention. Moreover, the relation between attitude and investment intention could be partially moderated by information richness. In particular, only when the project presentation use a combination of text-image-video media type, can the association of attitude-investment intention be strengthened. Other combinations of media types used in project presentation exert non-significant effects on the relation between attitude and investment intention. In addition, the moderating effects of investor’s computer efficacy have also been checked. Results indicate that computer efficacy is not a significant moderator. The findings in this study contribute to the stream of theory development in that we applied information richness theory to the context of crowdfunding. Information richness is combined with the mixture of media types used in the project presentation, which has not been highlighted. Secondly, this study contributes to the literature of perceived diagnosticity. It facilitates understanding why individuals could overcome cognitive barriers to make decisions upon limited information in the context of crowdfunding. In addition, this study contributes to the application of expectancy-value model by indicating the associations among perceived diagnosticity, attitude towards a project and investment intention in crowdfunding settings. The positive findings of this study also contribute to crowdfunding practitioners by suggesting them to improve the information richness of project presentations by combing various media types; ultimately, to enhance the utilization of relevant information delivered by the project presentation.