Are you part of the crowd? The role of sex and environmental characteristics for crowdfunding awareness
基于信息处理理论，研究性别和感知社会经济环境如何影响个人对众筹的认知，发现女性比男性更依赖环境特征来形成众筹认知。
Crowdfunding has become an alternative source of financing for entrepreneurial new ventures and social projects. While identifying and “tapping the right crowd” of backers has been shown to be crucial for the success of crowdfunding campaigns, we still lack a basic understanding of why individuals become backers in the first place and why so many others do not. Building on information processing theory, we advance crowdfunding awareness as an important precedent to actual engagement as a backer. We hypothesize and—using a sample of 1,042 individuals in Flanders (Belgium)—show that individuals’ crowdfunding awareness depends on whether they are male or female, as well as on the (perceived) socioeconomic environment they are in. Furthermore, our findings suggest that women tend to derive their crowdfunding awareness to a larger extent from these environmental characteristics than men. These results have important implications for theory and practice.