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Understanding the Effects of Endorsements in Scientific Crowdfunding

Published: 02 May 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Understanding the factors that persuade backers to donate to research projects has become increasingly important with the rising popularity of scientific crowdfunding. Although there are many similarities between enterprise and scientific crowdfunding, some factors differentiate these two forms of crowdfunding. One such factor is the use of endorsements. The endorsement helps backers gain trust based on expert opinions about the competency of the researchers and the usefulness of the projects. We analyzed 810 endorsements from scientific campaigns posted on Experiment.com and derived a taxonomy of topics discussed in the endorsements. A regression analysis revealed that when endorsers explained the skills of the campaign owners, the probability of success of the campaign improved; on the contrary, when endorsers reiterated the goal of the project, the campaign was less likely to succeed. We conclude with design implications formulated from our findings to better support scientific crowdfunding.

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Cited By

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  • (2022)Exploring the endorsement effect on scientific crowdfunding performance: Evidence from Experiment.comTelematics and Informatics10.1016/j.tele.2022.10187273(101872)Online publication date: Sep-2022
  • (2018)Exploring Characteristics of Academic Crowdfunding in Japan2018 7th International Congress on Advanced Applied Informatics (IIAI-AAI)10.1109/IIAI-AAI.2018.00098(458-461)Online publication date: Jul-2018

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '17: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    May 2017
    7138 pages
    ISBN:9781450346559
    DOI:10.1145/3025453
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 02 May 2017

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    Author Tags

    1. crowdfunding
    2. endorsement
    3. scientific crowdfunding

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    • (2022)Exploring the endorsement effect on scientific crowdfunding performance: Evidence from Experiment.comTelematics and Informatics10.1016/j.tele.2022.10187273(101872)Online publication date: Sep-2022
    • (2018)Exploring Characteristics of Academic Crowdfunding in Japan2018 7th International Congress on Advanced Applied Informatics (IIAI-AAI)10.1109/IIAI-AAI.2018.00098(458-461)Online publication date: Jul-2018

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