Soutenir un projet de financement participatif: une contribution risquée ?

Crowdfunding allows artists to fund the production of their own projects by drawing on the contributions of a large number of individuals in exchange for pre-defined rewards. Contributors are “prosumers :” they are both consumers and producers of the product they buy. Since they back projects at an early stage, they face uncertainty with respect to the quality as well as the delivery of the good that will be produced. Their attitude towards risk is therefore a predictor of the amount contributed. In this paper, we elicit the risk aversion coefficients of real users of a Brazilian crowdfunding platform (Catarse) using the Holt and Laury’s [2002] choice procedure. We show that risk aversion negatively predicts the level of contributions to musical projects when contributors are geographically distant from the project owner, that is, when highly exposed to uncertainty with respect to the quality and delivery of the product.