The Impact of Project and Founder Quality on Crowdfunding Success

This study examines how the quality of crowdfunding projects and their founders affect the success of crowdfunding campaigns. Examining hand-collected data of 118 crowdfunding projects, we find that the presence of more quality signals and the provision of additional founder information are associated with a higher probability of success. These findings confirm the role of quality on funding outcomes. By having more project and founder quality indicators, the information asymmetry problem becomes less severe and investors have more trust to invest in a project. Further analyses show that the result holds for equity-based crowdfunding rather than reward-based crowdfunding.