Impulsive Pledging Behavior in Crowdfunding Platforms: Conceptualization, Scale Development, and Validation

Over time, countless entrepreneurs have devoted their entire careers to establish new businesses. However, entrepreneurs face several challenges, of which monetary constraints are the most common. Under this condition, to realize their creative projects, individuals have adopted computer-mediated crowdfunding to solicit funds from other individuals. Despite crowdfunding increasingly attracting attention, research has focused mainly on the creators’ perspectives. There is scant research on the funders’ (consumers who give money) experiences and their motivations for funding a project. Nevertheless, information-processing overload is compounded by the volume of information that individuals experience, which leads to great complexity in funders’ decision making. Thus, for better understanding of this potential, it is important to understand the critical elements that influence project funding success. Therefore, this study explores how elements of touch (including essential content and social media factors) affect one’s impulsive pledging behaviors and other actions. In particular, the fundraising efforts affecting customer experience can be explored in three significant stages: (1) understanding the critical elements that prompt customers’ impulsive pledging behaviors, (2) exploring customer (i.e., lurker) citizenship behavior by enhancing their flow experiences, and (3) evaluating the role of normative enforcing factors as a critical mechanism in supporting crowdfunding projects. Therefore, this study aims to understand the relation between crowdfunding and funder experiences using three subprojects with different points of penetration. The objective of the first subproject is to explore how different influencers (i.e., content and social media indicators) affect future-oriented emotions (i.e., expected benefits and anticipated regret) of the funds through the visualization process, which in turn encourage customers’ impulsive pledging behaviors. Broadening the results of the first subproject, the second subproject utilizes the social influence theory to identify relations between browsing quality in an SNS-based community, flow experiences, and citizenship behavior from lurkers’ perspectives. Moreover, a longitudinal study examined the relations among lurkers’ participations, experience, and actual beneficial behaviors. The second subproject also conceptualizes, constructs, and tests a multiple-item scale that examines lurker citizenship behaviors using psychometric scale development approaches. To explain the potential benefits of the herding effect on the SNS-based community of specific funding projects, the third subproject examines the effects of normative enforcing factors on we-intention through a normative process, which in turn influences the actual purchase and sharing behaviors. The related findings are expected to not only advance the theoretical understanding of the important elements of crowdwork success along with funder’s experience and behaviors but also provide insights into the implications for creators in managing their projects on crowdfunding platforms.