The power of positivity? The influence of positive psychological capital language on crowdfunding performance

By Aaron H. Anglin, Jeremy C. Short, Will Drover, Regan M. Stevenson, A. Mckenny, Thomas H. Allison. Journal of Business Venturing, 2018

392 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract We extend the entrepreneurship literature to include positive psychological capital — an individual or organization's level of psychological resources consisting of hope, optimism, resilience, and confidence — as a salient signal in crowdfunding. We draw from the costless signaling literature to argue that positive psychological capital language usage enhances crowdfunding performance. We examine 1726 crowdfunding campaigns from Kickstarter, finding that entrepreneurs conveying positive psychological capital experience superior fundraising performance. Human capital moderates this relationship while social capital does not, suggesting that costly signals may, at times, enhance the influence of costless signals. Post hoc analyses suggest findings generalize across crowdfunding types, but not to IPOs.

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics, Management Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/882b886e54f6ef7d6461c14afcdb9e59e35711dc

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Citations in the corpus

Entrepreneurial Finance and Moral Hazard: Evidence from Token Offerings (2020, methodology): “To address this concern, I perform a generalized least squares (GLS) estimation instead of the OLS procedure (see Anglin et al. (2018) for an application in the context of crowdfunding).”
Entrepreneurial alertness: Exploring its psychological antecedents and effects on firm outcomes (2021, background): “Meanwhile, entrepreneurs with higher optimism tend to disregard or discount negative information (Anglin et al., 2018b), which further motivates them to proceed with their entrepreneurial tasks without making any compromises.”
Founder passion, neural engagement and informal investor interest in startup pitches: An fMRI study (2020, background): “…investor decision making in entrepreneurship, with several studies examining the investment choices of professional venture capitalists and other investors (e.g., Anglin et al., 2018; Chen et al., 2009; Clarke et al., 2019; Drover et al., 2017; Huang and Pearce, 2015; Kerr et al., 2011).”