Purpose

In this study, the authors sought to investigate how the implicit social ties of both project owners and potential backers are associated with crowdfunding project success.

Design/methodology/approach

Drawing on social ties theory and factors that affect crowdfunding success, in this research, the authors developed a model to study how project owners' and potential backers' implicit social ties are associated with crowdfunding projects' degrees of success. The proposed model was empirically tested with crowdfunding data collected from Kickstarter and social media data collected from Twitter. The authors performed the test using an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model with fixed effects.

Findings

The authors found that project owners' implicit social ties (specifically, their social media activities, degree centrality and betweenness centrality) are significantly and positively associated with crowdfunding projects' degrees of success. Meanwhile, potential project backers' implicit social ties (their social media activities and degree centrality) are negatively associated with crowdfunding projects' degrees of success. The authors also found that project size moderates the effects of project owners' social media activities on projects' degrees of success.

Originality/value

This work contributes to the literature on crowdfunding by investigating how the implicit social ties of both potential backers and project owners on social media are associated with crowdfunding project success. This study extends the previous research on social ties' roles in explaining crowdfunding project success by including implicit social ties, while the literature explored only explicit social ties.

中文翻译：

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项目所有者和潜在支持者的隐性社会关系在众筹项目成功中的作用

目的

在这项研究中，作者试图调查项目所有者和潜在支持者的隐性社会关系如何与众筹项目的成功相关。

设计/方法论/途径

在这项研究中，作者利用社会关系理论和影响众筹成功的因素，开发了一个模型来研究项目所有者和潜在支持者的隐性社会关系如何与众筹项目的成功程度相关。使用从 Kickstarter 收集的众筹数据和从 Twitter 收集的社交媒体数据对所提出的模型进行了实证测试。作者使用具有固定效应的普通最小二乘 (OLS) 回归模型进行了测试。

发现

作者发现，项目所有者的隐性社会关系（特别是他们的社交媒体活动、程度中心性和介数中心性）与众筹项目的成功程度显着且正相关。与此同时，潜在项目支持者的隐性社会关系（他们的社交媒体活动和学位中心度）与众筹项目的成功程度呈负相关。作者还发现，项目规模会调节项目所有者的社交媒体活动对项目成功程度的影响。

原创性/价值

这项工作通过调查潜在支持者和项目所有者在社交媒体上的隐性社会关系如何与众筹项目的成功相关联，为众筹文献做出了贡献。本研究通过纳入隐性社会关系，扩展了先前关于社会关系在解释众筹项目成功中的作用的研究，而文献仅探讨了显性社会关系。