The Legitimization Effect of Crowdfunding Success: A Consumer Perspective
基于合法性和消费者推断理论，通过五项实验发现，年轻企业的众筹成功会增强消费者对其认知合法性的感知，进而提升购买意愿、品牌态度和推荐意愿，但这一效应仅适用于年轻企业，对成熟企业则消失甚至逆转。
Based on legitimacy and consumer inference theory, we examine when, how, and why past crowdfunding success influences the perceptions and behaviors of consumers. Across five studies (four controlled experiments and one field experiment), our findings demonstrate that a young venture’s past crowdfunding success enhances consumers’ perceptions of its cognitive legitimacy. This “legitimization effect of crowdfunding success” leads to positive outcomes with respect to purchase intentions, brand attitudes, and consumers’ willingness to recommend young ventures to others. These effects are robust across different product categories. However, our findings also reveal that these positive effects occur exclusively for young ventures, whereas they disappear or even reverse for established ones.