Get the Balance Right: Can Normative Appeals Encourage Funders to Support Selected Crowdfunding Campaigns?

Increasingly more and more people turn to crowdfunding, either as entrepreneurs to get their idea funded or as financiers to help others realizing what might become a successful business one day. One situation frequently encountered on crowdfunding platforms is that certain projects receive more funding than needed, whereas others fail to achieve sufficient funding. To this day, no research has examined how a more efficient distribution of funds on crowdfunding platforms can be achieved. Since crowdfunding is a highly social process, we propose social norms as a governance mechanism to balance crowd’s funds more efficiently. Therefore, this paper proposes an experiment to test if social normative appeals can be used as a tool to actively influence the funding behavior of individuals, ultimately increasing the number of funded campaigns.