Impact of Response on Crowdfunding's Financing Per-formance:Moderating Effect of Symbols
Crowdfunding,as an emerging online financing model,provides new funding opportunities for entrepreneurs and small and medium-sized enterprises.However,crowdfunding projects often face low success rates,with many projects failing to meet their ex-pected funding goals.In this context,responses from fundraisers have become a key factor influencing project success.Crowdfund-ing fundraisers respond to online comments using both symbols and text,both of which jointly determine investors'decisions.This paper focuses on the impact of symbols and text sentiment on the financing performance of crowdfunding projects and explores the moderating role of symbols in this context.Based on the theoretical framework of psychological distance in Construal Level Theory(CLT),this paper elaborates on the per-suasive effects of fundraisers'responses from a psychological per-spective and constructs a psychological distance model based on the probability of event occurrence as proposed in CLT.Data were collected using web crawlers to scrape 3,644 projects and 148,833 fundraiser responses from the Modian crowdfunding platform.The data were cleaned,preprocessed,and normalized for analysis.Natu-ral language processing(NLP)techniques were used to extract text and symbol features from the responses.Sentiment annotation of the response texts was conducted using a Naive Bayes classification model based on corpus tagging;punctuation marks(exclamation marks and question marks)and emoticons were quantified,and an econometric model was constructed to estimate the effects of text sentiment and symbols.The research results indicate that compared to non-neutral sentiment responses,neutral sentiment responses are more effective in reduc-ing the psychological distance between investors and fundraisers,thereby improving financing performance.Among non-neutral sen-timents,negative sentiment is more effective in eliciting empathy.In terms of symbols,punctuation marks positively affect financing performance and negatively moderate the efficacy of response sen-timent,while emoticons have a negative impact on financing per-formance and positively moderate the relationship between response sentiment and financing performance.When examining the detailed effects of punctuation marks,it was found that exclamation marks are the primary reason for the negative moderation of response sentiment on financing performance,while the moderating effect of question marks is not significant.Further robustness tests show that differences in culture,investment returns,and social relationships may lead to varying effectiveness of text and symbols across differ-ent crowdfunding platforms.Therefore,future research can further explore the differences in symbol usage across different linguistic backgrounds.Theoretically,this paper applies the concept of psychological dis-tance to the interactive information between fundraisers and inves-tors,suggesting that the psychological distance between fundraisers and investors is one of the factors affecting crowdfunding perfor-mance in the crowdfunding domain.This enriches the exploration of psychological distance in text interaction,enhances Construal Level Theory,and provides a theoretical explanation for text per-suasion mechanisms and psychological distance effects.Practically,this paper provides specific recommendations for crowdfunding fundraisers on how to effectively respond to online comments.Firstly,fundraisers should focus on expressing neutral sentiments to shorten the psychological distance with investors.This can be achieved by using objective and neutral language,avoiding overly emotional vocabulary.Secondly,moderate use of punctuation marks,such as exclamation points,can enhance the emotional expression of responses and improve financing outcomes.Lastly,the use of emoticons should be carefully considered based on the context and investor preferences to avoid unnecessary negative impacts.In summary,through empirical research,this paper reveals the significant impact of fundraiser responses'sentiment and symbol usage on the financing performance of crowdfunding projects.By applying Construal Level Theory and psychological distance to the crowdfunding domain,this study not only enriches the existing the-oretical framework but also provides practical guidance for effective responses in crowdfunding.
Symbol ContentResponse SentimentPsychological DistanceCrowdfundingText Mining
万方数据
维普
