• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.229-249
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• 2018

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to conduct exploratory comparative research on the determinants of successful crowdfunding projects, focusing on multiple crowdfunding platforms in Korea, U.S., and Japan. Design/methodology/approach This study collected data from three representative crowdfunding platforms: Wadiz (Korea), Kickstarter (U.S.), and Readyfor (Japan). Based on 1,906 crowdfunding projects from Wadiz, 3,864 projects from Kickstarter, and 3,060 projects from Readyfor, multiple regression models were applied. Findings Focusing on the crowdfunding projects which have overly achieved goal amount, the analysis results show that the number of comments, the number of Facebook likes and the number of backers have an positive impact on the performance of crowdfunding projects, while target amount has a negative impact. Comparatively, word counts of project description have an impact on funding performance in U.S. and Japan, while the number of images in project description affects funding performance in Korea and U.S. Meanwhile, video clips in project description has little impact on crowdfunding performance in all of the three funding platforms.

• Korea Trade Review
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• v.45 no.1
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• pp.13-29
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• 2020

With the development of the Internet environment, cross-border crowdfunding has emerged as a novel method to attract foreign investors online. Focusing on 324 South Korea-based crowdfunding projects from Kickstarter, which is a representative cross-border crowdfunding platform, this study explores the trends of South Korea-based funding projects and examines the effects of key determinants on crowdfunding outcomes. Regarding the characteristics of crowdfunding projects, analysis results show that the appropriate goal amount and funding period, sufficient updates of project status, and active communication is critical for success. Additionally, from the perspective of project creators, this research finds that creators need to pay greater attention to writing their detailed biographies. Finally, examining the characteristics of project backers, this study shows that attracting project backers from various countries would be desirable rather than focusing on Korean sponsors from the start.

• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.1-19
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• 2017

Purpose This study examines the roles of individual- and country-level social capital in entrepreneurial activities from the context of crowdfunding. Design/methodology/approach Two primary sources were used for data collection. From Kickstarter, the largest U.S.-based crowdfunding platform, this study obtained 15,716 crowdfunding projects and individual-level social capital. For country-level social capital, the social capital index from the 2016 Legatum Prosperity Index was utilized. By matching individual- and country-level social capital for each crowdfunding project, this research estimates the role of social capital in entrepreneurial activities at the individual and country level using the Poisson regression and the negative binomial regression. Findings Individual-level social capital measured by the number of Facebook friends, the number of other crowdfunding projects that a crowdfunding project founder invested in, and the word count of the description of a crowdfunding project are positively associated with the number of crowdfunding projects created by founders. The country-level social capital measured by aggregated social capital index is also positively associated with the number of crowdfunding projects created by founders. Both individual- and country-level social capital have a positive impact on entrepreneurial activities in terms of the creation of new crowdfunding projects.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.15 no.5
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• pp.560-569
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• 2015

Crowd funding is the method of raising money for a project, companies from a large group of people via the Internet, in return for future products or equity. Kickstarter is the largest and most successful crowdfunding site where creative projects raise reward based funding. Drawing on dataset of 80,267 projects with combined funding over $1.3b from 8.1m people, this paper suggest that backer select project based on their preference on the project, instead profitability of the project. It suggests that well-established platform and big size of network increases the chance of success of the project due to a ripple effect and blockbuster effects. Clear communication about the project's idea and goal is highly correlated with success. Regular communication on the project site, such as by constant progress updates, helps the success of the project. Equity-based crowdfunding is emerging as an innovative means of raising capital for businesses, so it has been receiving a lot of attention and expectation from the government and the market. The findings of this paper and others will help to get some understanding and insight into equity-based crowdfunding. However, Kickstarter differs from equity-based crowdfunding in the goals of the backers. Kickstarter's backers are not investors, they are contributors. To understand equity-based crowdfunding, the subject will need further study.

• Soft Computing and Machine Intelligence
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.24-30
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• 2021

The accelerated growth of the internet and the enormous amount of data availability has become the primary reason for machine learning applications for data analysis and, more specifically, pattern recognition and decision making. In this paper, we focused on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter and collected the comments in order to apply neural networks to classify the projects based on the sentiments of backers. The power of customer reviews and sentiment analysis has motivated us to apply this technique in crowdfunding to find timely indications and identify suspicious activities and mitigate the risk of money loss.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.281-288
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• 2018

Crowdfunding has seen an enormous rise, becoming a new alternative funding source for emerging startup companies in recent years. Despite the huge success of crowdfunding, it has been reported that only around 40% of crowdfunding campaigns successfully raise the desired goal amount. The purpose of this study is to investigate key factors influencing successful fundraising on crowdfunding platforms. To this end, we mainly focus on contents of project campaigns, particularly their linguistic cues as well as multiple features extracted from project information and multimedia contents. We reveal which of these features are useful for predicting success of crowdfunding campaigns, and then build a predictive model based on those selected features. Our experimental results demonstrate that the built model predicts the success or failure of a crowdfunding campaign with 86.15% accuracy.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.1-10
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• 2024

This study explores incomplete decision-making dynamics on reward-based crowdfunding platforms, focusing on temporal and social factors influencing backers' decisions. Utilizing the temporal aspect (i.e., pledging campaign phase) and social aspect (i.e., current pledged amount ratio) as stimuli within the stimulus-organism-response framework, our findings reveal that nearly 50.9% of respondents change their initial decisions, highlighting widespread incomplete information processing. Backers are more prone to altering decisions under heightened time pressure and display herding behaviors. Furthermore, backers exhibit an increased likelihood of changing decisions under heightened time pressure, coupled with a greater chance that the pledged goal amount will not be achieved. The study discusses theoretical and practical implications.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.28 no.7
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• pp.155-164
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• 2023

In this paper, we examine the influence of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG)-related content on the success of online crowdfunding proposals. Along with the increasing significance of ESG standards in business, investment proposals incorporating ESG concepts are now commonplace. Due to the ESG trend, conventional wisdom holds that the majority of proposals with ESG concepts will have a higher rate of success. We investigate by analyzing over 9000 online business presentations found in a Kickstarter dataset to determine which characteristics of these proposals led to increased investment. We first utilized lexicon-based measurement and Feature Engineering to determine the relationship between environment and society scores and financial indicators. Next, Logistic Regression is utilized to determine the effect of including environmental and social terms in a project's description on its ability to obtain funding. Contrary to popular belief, our research found that microentrepreneurs were less likely to succeed with proposals that focused on ESG issues. Our research will generate new opportunities for research in the disciplines of information science and crowdfunding by shedding new light on the environment of online micro-entrepreneurship.

• Journal of Information Technology Services
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.153-174
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• 2016

On account of multiple causes, including prolonged global economic crisis, addressing environmental pollution and the advent of hyper-connected society, a new paradigm called 'sharing economy' has rapidly emerged. Many startups have attempted to build promising business model based on the sharing economy concept. Nevertheless, successful cases are still very rare in the global level, except for Uber and Airbnb cases. Therefore, this study analyzes necessary causes and sufficient causes for successful settlements in the market through a comparative case analysis on digital matching firms in the sharing economy businesses. For the case study, we compare five successful cases (Uber, Airbnb, Kickstarter, TaskRabbit and DogVacay), three failure cases (Homejoy, Ridejoy and Tuterspree) and a platform cooperativism case (Juno) in accordance with six value attributes of business model including value proposition, market segment, value chain, cost structure and profit potential, value network and competitive strategy. We apply Boolean method to support controlled comparison and eliminate unnecessary attributes. The Boolean analysis result shows that value proposition, cost structure and profit potential, value network and competitive strategy are the essential attributes. Furthermore, the result indicates that each attribute is a necessary condition, where all four conditions should be met simultaneously in order to be successful. With this result, we discuss essential consideration for those who are planning startup based on the sharing economy business model.

• International Journal of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.231-242
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• 2023

Crowd funding faces a number of significant obstacles despite its rapid growth and popularity, with the main one being the possible asymmetric information between fundraisers and potential supporters. A study taxonomy based on signalling theory has been created to compare projects originating from Taiwan and India. This was made possible by obtaining a dataset from the crowd funding website, Kickstarter (Global platform). To make the project effective, the study's goal is to look into how signals (e.g., goal-setting, comments, and updates) might be used to reduce the problem of information asymmetry. Thus, we applied an Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression. Both Taiwan and India demonstrated signal mitigation of information asymmetry, but Taiwan showed a stronger relationship between ambitious goals and successful projects than India. The relative importance of project comments has been found to be stronger in Taiwan than in India; the relative importance of project updates has been found to be weaker and negatively correlated with project success in India, in contrast to Taiwan. Notably, our findings provide a theoretical and practical framework for understanding and using signals in successful crowd funding campaigns and activities in these two emerging countries.