The role of project owners' and potential backers' implicit social ties in crowdfunding project success
研究了众筹项目发起人和潜在支持者在社交媒体上的隐性社会关系（如社交活动、中心度）如何影响项目成功，发现发起人的隐性关系有正面作用，而支持者的则有负面作用。
Purpose In this study, the authors sought to investigate how the implicit social ties of both project owners and potential backers are associated with crowdfunding project success. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on social ties theory and factors that affect crowdfunding success, in this research, the authors developed a model to study how project owners' and potential backers' implicit social ties are associated with crowdfunding projects' degrees of success. The proposed model was empirically tested with crowdfunding data collected from Kickstarter and social media data collected from Twitter. The authors performed the test using an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model with fixed effects. Findings The authors found that project owners' implicit social ties (specifically, their social media activities, degree centrality and betweenness centrality) are significantly and positively associated with crowdfunding projects' degrees of success. Meanwhile, potential project backers' implicit social ties (their social media activities and degree centrality) are negatively associated with crowdfunding projects' degrees of success. The authors also found that project size moderates the effects of project owners' social media activities on projects' degrees of success. Originality/value This work contributes to the literature on crowdfunding by investigating how the implicit social ties of both potential backers and project owners on social media are associated with crowdfunding project success. This study extends the previous research on social ties' roles in explaining crowdfunding project success by including implicit social ties, while the literature explored only explicit social ties.