关键词: 互联网众筹, 社会资本, 信息不对称, 社群

Abstract:  Internet-based crowdfunding has been regarded as the new mechanism of incubating creative programs which involves mass participation and value co-creation, and how to optimize the financing performance has always been an important topic in the field of crowdfunding. Although a few scholars have discussed the interaction between social capital and crowdfunding performance, there is still no systematic research on the effects of heterogeneous social capital on crowdfunding performance. In fact, there are differences in governance mechanisms between internal and external social capital of crowdfunding platforms, so it is necessary to treat them differently.
Firstly, this paper defines the concept of social-network-capital and community capital based on the theory of social capital.While the social-network-capital refers to all kinds of potential resources acquired by initiators from their third-party social networks (e.g. Weixin, Weibo, Facebook, etc.), the community capital refers to all kinds of potential resources acquired by initiators from a decentralized network within crowdfunding platform. Hence, the former is often about the “individual” and the latter is often about the “idea”.
Secondly, three hypotheses are put forward based on information asymmetry theory. From the perspective of governance mechanism, social-network-capital and community capital play different roles in ex-ante screening and ex-post supervision. Specifically, social-network-capital is conducive to identifying the credit types of initiators and supervising the implementation of initiators, while community capital plays a significant role in identifying project risks and punishing project defaults. Because the latter concerns the facts more than the individuals, it has unique advantages in solving the problem of “trust of strangers”. Based on the above theoretical analysis, this paper puts forward three hypotheses as follows:H1, social-network-capital has a positive impact on crowdfunding performance. H2, community capital has a positive impact on crowdfunding performance. H3, comparatively, community capital does better.
At last, the paper empirically identifies the relationship between heterogeneous social capitals and crowdfunding performance by using multiple regression model based on the data collected from the Chines earliest crowdfunding website “www.zhongchou.cn” over the period of 2014-2015 from public financing pages of projects, and the empirical results support all of the hypotheses. To sum up, the main empirical results are shown as follows:(1) two kinds of social capital both are positively correlated with crowdfunding performance, projects with stronger social bonds are more likely to succeed in financing activities. This shows that, in addition to hard information such as financial identity,crowdfunding investors can also obtain informal information of initiators, i.e. soft information, at a lower cost, which provides important references for crowdfunidng investment decision. (2) The effects of two types of social capital on crowdfunding performance is different, and the impact of community capital is more prominent than that of social-network-capital. The initiator and the members of the crowdfunding community are connected by weak links, and the maintenance of the relationship mostly depends on the common goal or interests but not personal favors, that is, they will treat of a matter as a case for discussion without reflection on any particular person. Therefore, the quality signal of projects transmitted by community capital is more trustworthy for investors to participate in decision-making.
The contributions of this paper are twofold. At first, there are many international literature studying the influence factors of crowdfunding performance and a few paper studying the correlation between the social capital and crowdfunding outcome. However, little attention has been paid to the different governance mechanism of heterogeneous social capital. This paper considers two types of social capital, one is embedded in initiators’ personal social network which is usually formed by “strong ties”, the other is embedded in a professional and decentralized social network which is usually form by “weak ties”. Second, it is found that the feature of “focus on the case but not the person” leads community capital performs better in screening risk and supervising agent. This finding is the most important theoretical contribution of this study.
This paper also provides advice on enterprise management and policy implementation for different types of participants of crowdfunding markets. The paper argues that the initiator should pay more attention to the development of personal social network, promote the accumulation of social capital, and improve the utilization rate of social network. Crowdfunding platforms should improve the project review processes and strictly fulfill the obligation of due diligence, more important, guiding the establishment of professional communities. The implementation of government policy should focus on strengthen the protection of crowdfunding investors and provide more ideas and technical guidance.

Key words: Internet-based crowdfunding, social capital, information asymmetry, community