Agricultural Internet Entrepreneurs’ Social Network Behaviors and Entrepreneurship Financing Performance

Abstract

From the perspective of social network behavior, our paper discusses the relationship between agricultural entrepreneurial social network behavior and entrepreneurial financing performance in an Internet crowdfunding setting, and investigates the moderating role of entrepreneurial team size. In this paper, the data-mining method is used to capture and collate data regarding 7585 venture projects on an Internet crowdfunding platform between 2014 and 2017. Ordinary least squares (OLS) and Probit models are applied to the empirical test. The results show that first, compared with other industries, the effect of agricultural entrepreneurs’ quality information disclosure on entrepreneurship financing performance is lower, whereas the effect of their social network interaction is higher. Second, the entrepreneurial team size has a positive moderating role on the former and a negative moderating role on the latter. Our research is of significance for agricultural enterprises to raise their financial performance in Internet crowdfunding, especially for Chinese agricultural micro-enterprises.