دانلود رایگان مقاله اثر اطلاعات آنلاین در تصمیم گیری در مورد سرمایه گذاری

abstract

How does online information influence investor decisions? Funders or investors have access to a variety of information about a project or product when they make investment decisions. Which kind of information affects investor behavior the most? Based on the elaboration likelihood model, we developed a research model and conducted an empirical study using objective data collected from a Chinese crowdfunding website. It was found that signals of quality and electronic word of mouth have significant positive effects on funder investment decisions. Results show that larger introduction word counts and video counts make funders feel the project has higher quality, and higher “Like” counts and online reviews make funders feel the project has good electronic word of mouth. Furthermore, analysis of the data here reveals that the central route information (signals of project quality) and the peripheral route information (e-word of mouth) have almost equal effects on funder investment decisions in the Chinese crowdfunding context. On the other hand, the central route was significantly more important for Science & Technology and Agriculture projects, whereas the peripheral route was more important for Entertainment and Art projects.

 5. Discussion

This study investigates which kind of project online information affects funders' decisions to invest. The findings show that the central route information (signals of project quality) and the peripheral route information (e-word of mouth) have almost equal effect on funder investment decisions. We can see from the hierarchical multiple regression analysis based on all data (Table 3) that in regression model 2, which considers only the two variables for signals of project quality (introduction word count and video count), those two variables explain 36.9% of the variance in the number of funders. However, after also including the two variables of e-word of mouth (“Like” count and the number of online reviews) in Model 3, the explained variance increases by 32.1%. This means that the influence of two routes' factors on funder investment decision are almost the same. Although some published studies show that the signals of project quality has a significant effect on crowdfunding project performance (Ahlers et al., 2015; Mollick, 2014), few papers point out that e-word of mouth has a positive correlation with funder investment decisions or crowdfunding performance. The research presented in this paper gives evidence that the central route information (signals of project quality) and the peripheral route information (e-word of mouth) have similar effects on funder investment decisions in mainland China.