Mollick, Ethan R. "The Dynamics of Crowdfunding: Determinants of Success and Failure." (July 11, 2012).
From the abstract: "Crowdfunding
allows founders of for-profit, artistic, and cultural ventures to fund their
efforts by drawing on relatively small contributions from a relatively large
number of individuals using the internet, without
standard financial intermediaries. Crowdfunding has been drawing substantial
attention from policy makers, managers, and entrepreneurs, but relatively
little notice from academics, even though it touches on many topics of
importance to scholars of entrepreneurship, including the determinants of
venture success and the geography of entrepreneurship. Drawing on a dataset of
nearly 47,000 projects with combined funding over $198M, this paper offers an
initial description of the underlying dynamics of success and failure among
crowdfunded ventures. It suggests that personal networks and underlying project
quality help predict the success of crowdfunding efforts, and that geography
plays a role in both the type of projects proposed and successful fundraising.
Finally, I find that the vast majority of founders make serious efforts to
fulfill their obligations to funders, but that over 75% deliver products later
than expected, with the degree of delay predicted by the level and amount of
funding a project receives." Read more
