Prosocial Goal Pursuit in Crowdfunding: Evidence from Kickstarter

In reward-based crowdfunding, creators of entrepreneurial projects solicit capital from potential consumers to reach a funding goal and offer future products/services in return. The authors examine consumers’ contribution patterns using a novel data set of 28,591 projects collected at 30-minute resolution from Kickstarter. Extending prior research that assumes that economic considerations (e.g., project quality, campaign success likelihood) drive backers’ decisions, the authors provide the cleanest field evidence so far that consumers also have prosocial motives to help creators reach their funding goals. They find that projects collect funding faster right before (vs. right after) meeting their funding goals because consumers not only are more likely to fund projects but also contribute greater amounts of money prior to goal attainment. This effect is amplified when the nature of a project tends to evoke consumers’ prosocial motivation and when a project’s creator is a single person. These results suggest that consumers’ prosocial motives not only play a role in reward-based crowdfunding but also can outweigh the opposing effects of economic factors including rational herding and certainty about campaign success