Sustainable crowdfunding and backers

: information processing and the role of social media fatigue

Abstract

To establish a successful project and achieve the financial target, entrepreneurs must collect supporters to endorse their initiative. Considering the increasing difficulty of launching a new business or brand and securing the necessary financing, entrepreneurs often use crowdfunding. Crowdfunding has piqued the interest of academics from a wide range of areas of study, such as economics and psychology due to the nature of the process and the demand for social circles. Psychology can provide a specific contribution to the study of crowdfunding by assessing how and why crowdfunding profiles can be more appealing to potential supporters, through the study of how potential backers process information contained in those profiles. This work looks at how individuals digest information about sustainable crowdfunding projects by focusing on how different features of the profiles presenting these projects appeal to the different cognitive systems every individual use, i.e. system 1 (more intuitive, supported by heuristics) vs. system 2 (more thorough and supported by cognitive resources). Furthermore, this study also assesses how social media fatigue affects the preference for crowdfunding profiles and whether it interacts with the use of the different systems. The study sample consisted of 88 individuals, and the results reveal that people are more prone to financially support sustainable crowdfunding profiles that appeal to system 1, regardless of the levels of social media fatigue.

Date of Award	29 Nov 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Rui Alberto Morais Costa da Silva Lopes (Supervisor)