Funding the story of hybrid ventures: Crowdfunder lending preferences and linguistic hybridity

By Todd W. Moss, Maija Renko, Emily S. Block, M. Meyskens. Journal of Business Venturing, 2017

186 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Prosocial crowdfunding platforms are venues for individual lenders to allocate resources to ventures that specifically pursue economic and social value. In a setting where hybridity is expected, do crowdfunders respond positively to category-spanning ventures, or do they prefer to fund ventures that are more clearly situated within a single category? Drawing on theory rooted in category membership and spanning, our hypotheses test whether prosocial crowdfunding lenders will more quickly allocate resources to hybrid microenterprises that communicate their hybridity, or to those that communicate a single one of their dual aims. Our study demonstrates that even in such a setting, crowdfunders lend more quickly to microenterprises that position themselves within a single linguistic category in which the social is emphasized over the economic. This suggests that how hybrid organizations position themselves in their linguistic narratives has a significant impact on resource allocation by external prosocial audiences.

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics, Management Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0ce6334a5735afc43cad9ff842494a9c97c77570

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Citations in the corpus

• What signals matter for social startups? It depends: The influence of gender role congruity on social impact accelerator selection decisions (2019, background): “More recently, however, scholars have begun to examine the investment decisions of non-traditional investors, such as microlenders and crowdfunders, that tend to base their decisions on signals communicating a venture’s potential for social impact (e.g., Greenberg and Mollick, 2017; Johnson et al., ”