Resumen de Prosocial crowdfunding: A multilevel and cross-disciplinary analysis
Alberto Ibarra Garza
The crowdfunding industry is becoming more relevant year after year, both as an economic sector and as an academic field. It is believed that crowdfunding may soon have a larger funding volume than the venture capital industry. Also, leading academic journals are publishing articles that study this interesting phenomenon.
Within the crowdfunding industry, there is also a growing relevance of platforms that jointly pursue social and financial goals. These prosocial platforms have helped to democratise the access to funds, to fund individuals that are in financially adverse conditions, to promote entrepreneurship in poor countries and to facilitate cooperation among individuals who are either geographic or culturally distant from one another.
However, although the leading academic articles on crowdfunding have attracted great interest among scholars, there is still an area of opportunity to develop research that is cross-disciplinary and that not only studies crowdfunding at a transaction level, but also at an organisational and an industry perspective. The moment is critical for such research since the industry is still growing in importance, many countries are creating legislations to improve its regulation and new platforms are emerging all around the world.
Consequently, in order to understand better how crowdfunding can be an effective channel for improving social welfare, we developed three research projects that each analyse the industry from a different level and set of literatures: 1) we provide a framework for analysing the ethical concerns of the crowdfunding industry, for which we draw upon the crowdfunding and business ethics literature; 2) we develop a series of propositions that relate how certain elements of a platforms management control system may foster greater social impact, for which we refer to the management control, social enterprises and crowdfunding literature; and 3) we performed a quantitative analysis for uncovering how initial conditions relate to quicker access to funds and to better repayment rates in prosocial lending, for which we focused on the social enterprises, prosocial lending and crowdfunding literature.
