earticle

영어

Crowdfunding is an Internet-based service that has gained increasingly attention by both researchers and in business people. In terms of research, much work has done about positive factors contributing successful fundraising. To the contrary, little work has finished with regard to understanding negative sides which also exert significant influence on crowdfunding systems. This study attempts to fill the gap by investigating the impacts of perceived risk and suggesting risk reduction strategies. Perceived risk is commonly associated with individual’s feeling of uncertainty and undesirable consequence of engaging in an activity. It is noted that a risk-reduction strategy is generally related to risk sources and risk types. In terms of risk sources, this study focuses on project presentation which provides salient information for investors to a crowdfunding project. Unlike to conditioned financial reports and public disclosure, project presentation is based on limited information sources, which occurs the feeling of uncertainty. Based on perceived risk studies from e-commerce literature, we identify risk types to classify project presentation. In this study, research interest is bounded by reward-based crowdfunding that shares similar features for collecting attention from potential buyers or investors. Compared to crowdfunding investors, e-commerce consumers tend to make decisions with multiple information sources, which helps them reduce risks. However, e-commerce requires less physical or empirical evidences to make a decision just as crowdfunding does. Considering the unique settings of crowdfunding, we apply three types of risk perceptions from e-commerce literature relating to project presentation, namely, performance risk, financial risk and psychological risk. Performance risk emerges when an investor feels a probability of receiving a defect product is high or when s/he feels the factual product does not match with one described in a project webpage. Financial risk refers to the likelihood of suffering monetary loss by undesirable transaction. It has been found that financial risk commonly relates to failure in fulfilling expectation with regard to delivery, quality and after-service. Investors encounter psychological risk derived from investors’ low confidence on fundraising or the quality of reward to investment. In order to reduce perceived risk, project presentation is expected to have the ability of providing available information to increase investor’s understanding about the project. In this study, we employ the construct of informativeness to describe such an ability of project presentation. Any information cues, such as the project status, the introduction of entrepreneurs and the product or service description, which investors perceive useful might increase the level of informativeness in the context of crowdfunding. Overall, the purpose of this study is to investigate the impacts of perceived risk and risk reduction strategy in the context of crowdfunding. Considering project presentation as a crucial risk source, this study identifies three types of risk perceptions. Simultaneously, informativeness of project presentation is revealed as an available risk reliever. Experimental projects are used to test the hypothesized relations among perceived risk, informativeness and investment intention. Results demonstrate that informativeness has significantly negative impacts on performance risk, financial risk and psychological risk. Meanwhile, informativeness exerts significantly positive influence on investor’s decision-making. In addition, results also report that performance risk and psychological risk have significantly negative impacts on investment intention, while financial risk exerts non-significant influence in the context of crowdfunding. This study makes a number of contributions. First, this is one of the first studies that highlight the negative impacts of perceived risk in the context of crowdfunding. Researchers in crowdfunding seem concerning more with factors that have positive effects on the success of fundraising rather than negative factors. However, not only positive factors are useful, the reducing of the influences of negative factors should also be helpful. This study provides evidence for such a view. Second, although some studies indicated that reward-based crowdfunding share similar features with e-commerce, in terms of perceived risk, this study provides inconsistent results. For example, time risk is a significantly negative factor in e-commerce. However, in the crowdfunding settings, investors usually have better patience than e-commerce consumers, because they know many projects are in-progress. Thus, a long waiting time (several weeks or even several months) before receiving products is acceptable for investors. In this case, time risk seems negligible. In addition, this study contributes to the literature of crowdfunding by empirically investigating informativeness being of an available risk reliever and a significantly positive predictor of investment intention as well. Also, this study equips founders and platform administrators with practical suggestions by suggesting them to provide project information as available as possible to improve the informativeness of project presentation; and thus, to alleviate risk perceptions of the project and to improve their investment intention as well.