How Different are Crowdfunders? Examining Archetypes of Crowdfunders and Their Choice of Projects

Abstract

While current research treats the crowdfunders as a homogeneous group, we argue that such an assumption may limit our understanding of the complexities of the crowdfunder community. In this paper, we take a first step by identifying different archetypes of crowdfunders. Using public data from Kickstarter, we identified four distinct types of crowdfunders: Active Backers, Trend Followers, the Altruistic, and the Crowd. Our results show that crowdfunders are highly heterogeneous, with different motivations that are reflected in their strategies and behaviors. We further hypothesized and tested how the strategies and motivations of different crowdfunder archetypes further influence their choices of when and which projects to fund. In so doing, we not only reconcile conflicting results from the literature, but also synthesize differing theoretical perspectives that have been applied to understand the crowdfunding phenomenon.