Confidence Signaling, Gender, and Crowdfunding Outcomes

Abstract: Crowdfunding is a relatively new addition to the entrepreneurial range of funding options. It has been considered a “game changer’ and an “equalizer” for entrepreneurs seeking to finance new ventures. However, it shares several attributes with traditional funding methods as well as many of the same investor concerns. Since research is still scant on both crowdfunding as whole and on its fast-developing sub-categories this study endeavored to analyze two related topics in this area. Understanding how close this new paradigm is to the old is a focus of new research. In the case of this study perceived self-confidence of the crowdfunding project founder to the successful outcomes is examined. Additionally, to see if gender bias plays a part in this new era it is included as a control to determine if women need to project greater confidence than men to overcome these and achieve the same goals. Kickstarter.com is one of the oldest and most successful rewards based crowdfunding sites in the world. A sample of 9050 completed campaigns from here were used for this analysis. In the methodology qualitative coding was used to identify the linguistic symbols of confidence. To empirically investigate the research questions statistical analysis was carried out to seek the relationships between confidence signaling and successful crowdfunding performance as well as if gender bias has a moderating effect. The two hypotheses were not supported by the results of this study. Self-confidence was not a predictor of crowdfunding success and gender did not have a significant influence on the outcomes.