Social Media Alleviates Venture Capital Funding Inequality for Women and Less Connected Entrepreneurs
研究利用Twitter和Crunchbase数据，发现社交媒体使用能改善女性和缺乏投资人网络关系的创业者获取风险投资的机会，通过缓解信息不对称来减少融资不平等。
Start-ups are increasingly using social media to signal quality and provide information to potential investors. However, the effectiveness of social media on venture capital (VC) financing is likely to be heterogeneous, differing by demographic and network characteristics of the founders. In this paper, we examine whether social media use can improve funding outcomes for firms founded by women and by other people also lacking connections to the investor network, two groups that face greater difficulties in securing VC financing. Using Twitter data and data on VC investment in start-ups from Crunchbase, we explore the interaction effect between Twitter usage and gender and between Twitter usage and the network constraint measure. Overall, we show that social media can mitigate some disparities in financing experienced by these firms through improving information access. We find that this effect is stronger for first-time entrepreneurs than for experienced ones, stronger for attracting new investors than repeat ones, and stronger in more competitive markets. Collectively, these results suggest that social media could primarily help women and less connected individuals obtain financing by alleviating information asymmetry between founders and investors. This paper was accepted by D. J. Wu, information systems. Funding: The authors thank Wharton Mack Institute of Innovation Management for funding support. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4728 .