Equity Crowdfunding and Access to Capital for User Entrepreneurs: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment
通过随机田野实验发现，投资者对传统生产者企业的兴趣显著高于用户创业者企业，这种偏见源于信息有限而非个人偏好，用户创业者可通过展示增长信号来缓解偏见。
We examine whether equity crowdfunding democratizes access to funding for nontraditional user entrepreneurs. User entrepreneurs start by creating a product to serve their own unmet needs with no expectations of monetary profit, then later decide to commercialize the product through entrepreneurship. In contrast, traditional (producer) entrepreneurs take a more profit-driven path to entrepreneurship and start by identifying an opportunity that has commercial potential. Through a randomized field experiment, we randomly reveal to some investors that a firm producing a product used by musicians is founded by a musician and conceal this founder-related information from other investors. Revealing the information suggests that the firm is a user innovator firm and concealing it suggests that the firm is a traditional producer firm. We find that investors are significantly more interested in the traditional producer firm. Through an additional field experiment, we identify that the bias against user entrepreneurs is statistical (based on a response to limited information) rather than taste based (based on an idiosyncratic dislike). Our findings suggest that user entrepreneurs can mitigate investor bias by displaying signals of quality such as those regarding firm growth and broad product appeal.