Resumen de Beyond the hybridity in crowdfunding: decisions, motivations and sustainability
Melina Moleskis
Beyond the Hybridity in Crowdfunding: Decisions, Motivations and Sustainability Crowdfunding embodies the innovative online phenomenon whereby funding resources are pooled together by people to support efforts initiated by others. This dissertation investigates the hybridity resonating from the dual character of crowdfunding that exhibits both financial and social traits. In the three essays that form this dissertation, I study the prevailing hybridity across crowdfunding platforms and project types, as well as the organizational hybridity of third party intermediaries. A systematic review of the theoretical and empirical literature on crowdfunding in the space of donations and rewards is included in Chapter 1. In this setting of non-financial motivations, I collect evidence and theoretical explanations for the decision-making behavior of the crowd and discuss the implications for the funding and post-funding success of campaigns. My investigation reveals how literature to date has upheld the importance of crowdfunding as a social and democratic tool, one that demonstrates wise judgment and clairvoyance in recognizing potential successes and creating value for all. Chapter 2 contains an empirical investigation of the crowds motivations and behavioral decision-making. It explores the effect of the interaction between certain characteristics of the project design (risk signals, creators gender, geography) and its purpose (humanitarian or entrepreneurial) on the likelihood of funding success. Building on the charitable giving and entrepreneurial finance literature streams, and through the lenses of behavioral economics and signaling theory, the study uses data from Kiva.org and finds that gender biases and risk signals exhibit a stronger impact for entrepreneurial projects, while humanitarian projects are more affected by home bias. By exposing the hybridity across projects on the same platform, the aim of the study is to reconcile results in prior literature and urge project creators to take these consequences into consideration when designing their campaigns. In Chapter 3, an empirical test of the theory on mission drift in hybrid organizations is carried out, using a constructed data set of Kivas partners (microfinance institutions), to examine the relationship between mission drift and sustainability. My key finding is that mission drift may appear harmless in the short run but, as time passes, it has a pronounced adverse impact on operational sustainability and survival within the microfinance ecosystem, and by extension the hybrid crowdfunding space of donations and lending. Collectively, through this work, I wish to make a modest contribution to the sustained development of the field and support the vigorous growth of an emergent phenomenon that is of rising social and economic importance.
