Information Systems Faculty Publications and Presentations

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

5-2025

Abstract

Crowdfunding founders increasingly rely on reward-based platforms to raise capital for their projects. However, the low success rate of reward-based project campaigns remains a concern for many founders and platform managers. Prior studies investigating participants’ motivations have focused on either the founder or backer perspective, with little research examining the joint effects of founder and backer motivations. Drawing on the theory of basic human values, we assert that founders and backers are strategic about their motivations for engaging in crowdfunding campaigns. We identify four basic human values—self-transcendence, self-enhancement, openness to change, and conservation—that may reveal their intrinsic motivations and investigate how the degree of congruence between founders and backers on these values can influence campaign success. Using data from Kickstarter, we first extract evidence of these four values from the founder’s project description and backers’ comments for each project and empirically test a moderated model of reward-based crowdfunding success. The findings indicate that congruences in the openness to change, self-transcendence, and conservation values between founders and backers positively relate to project campaign success, but these relationships weaken when the congruence becomes excessive. However, self-enhancement value congruence between founders and backers can consistently maintain a stable positive influence on project campaign success. Furthermore, linguistic conformity is positively related to campaign success but reduces the distinctiveness of the congruence effects related to self-transcendence and openness to change. The study’s findings contribute to the value congruence literature and provide insights on how to improve the chances of project success in reward-based crowdfunding.

Comments

Copyright © 2025 by the Association for Information Systems. 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 full citation on the first page. Copyright for components of this work owned by others than the Association for Information Systems must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists requires prior specific permission and/or fee. Request permission to publish from: AIS Administrative Office, P.O. Box 2712 Atlanta, GA, 30301-2712 Attn: Reprints, or via email from publications@aisnet.org.

Publication Title

Journal of the Association for Information Systems

DOI

10.17705/1jais.00924

Included in

Business Commons

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