We examine whether equity crowdfunding democratizes access to funding for nontraditional user entrepreneurs. User entrepreneurs start by creating a product to serve their own unmet needs with no expectations of monetary profit, then later decide to commercialize the product through entrepreneurship. In contrast, traditional (producer) entrepreneurs take a more profit-driven path to entrepreneurship and start by identifying an opportunity that has commercial potential. Through a randomized field experiment, we randomly reveal to some investors that a firm producing a product used by musicians is founded by a musician and conceal this founder-related information from other investors. Revealing the information suggests that the firm is a user innovator firm and concealing it suggests that the firm is a traditional producer firm. We find that investors are significantly more interested in the traditional producer firm. Through an additional field experiment, we identify that the bias against user entrepreneurs is statistical (based on a response to limited information) rather than taste based (based on an idiosyncratic dislike). Our findings suggest that user entrepreneurs can mitigate investor bias by displaying signals of quality such as those regarding firm growth and broad product appeal.

中文翻译：

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用户企业家的股权众筹和资本获取：来自随机实地实验的证据

我们研究股权众筹是否使非传统用户企业家获得资金的途径民主化。用户创业者首先创造一种产品来满足他们自己未被满足的需求，而不期望获得货币利润，然后决定通过创业将产品商业化。相比之下，传统的（生产商）企业家采取更受利润驱动的创业之路，并从识别具有商业潜力的机会开始。通过随机现场实验，我们随机向一些投资者透露，一家生产音乐家使用的产品的公司是由音乐家创立的，并向其他投资者隐瞒了与创始人相关的信息。披露信息表明该公司是一家用户创新公司，而隐瞒信息则表明该公司是一家传统生产商公司。我们发现投资者对传统生产商公司更感兴趣。通过额外的现场实验，我们发现对用户企业家的偏见是统计上的（基于对有限信息的反应）而不是基于品味（基于特殊的厌恶）。我们的研究结果表明，用户企业家可以通过显示质量信号（例如与公司增长和广泛的产品吸引力有关的信号）来减轻投资者的偏见。