Trust isn’t blind: Exploring Visual Investor Cues in Equity Crowdfunding

Overcoming informational uncertainty and financial risk remains a challenge for crowd investors to trust and interact within the equity crowdfunding (ECF) market. Based on the theoretical lens of herding behavior, we demonstrate that visual cues in investor profiles impact the investment decision of subsequent investors. Specifically, this paper provides preliminary evidence on the effect of investor profile images and badges on investment behavior and campaign funding. In a first study, we draw on a dataset of over 30,000 individual investment observations from a leading ECF platform to show that profile images in particular exert positive effects on subsequent investments. Study 2 will build on these findings through a discrete choice experiment. Our results indicate that herding is driven by the perception of credible investors triggered by heuristic cues. Implications for platform operators are discussed in the paper

Review of Equity Crowdfunding Practices through Santara.id in the Perspective of Islamic Economic Law

This article aims to find out the mechanism of equity crowdfunding through the santara platform from Islamic economic law. This article uses a qualitative method using library data. This article finds that santara.id is an intermediary between investors and issuers in developing a business. The scheme is similar to the muḍārabah contract, the investor is identical to ṣāḥib al-māl, and the issuer is identical to the muḍārib. However, this activity cannot be considered as muḍārabah cooperation because there has been no concrete agreement regarding the muḍārabah agreement. This article provides suggestions so that santara.id can further develop the platform's promotion in the community. It is because santara.id can provide investment services for the middle class, both as investors and issuers

Competition in financial services

In the financial services sector, the failure of a single institution can have a compounding effect on the sector, and on national and global economies. In particular, there is systemic risk from inter-institution lending, and this effect is more complex in Australia due to the small number of major players. In retail banking in Australia, following a similar practice in most developed countries, if an unsecured creditor is a retail depositor, their deposit is insured by the government. That is, if a retail bank fails, the Federal Government will make the depositors whole. The regulatory system, particularly the prudential regulatory system, is designed to protect depositors’ and borrowers’ interests, and this protects the interest of the government. The effect is that regulatory policy on banking has prioritised stability in consideration of the sovereign risk associated with the risk of retail bank failure. However, this approach also creates a policy dilemma. The dilemma concerns the extent to which the retail banking sector can attain the benefits of the vigorous rivalry from effective and efficient competition, without unduly risking stability and the potential of a devastating call on the public purse. Specifically, in the context of effective and efficient competition, there is limited competitiveness in retail banking in Australia. This is reflected in the static state of market share between the four major banks, and very slow and marginal improvements gains even by strong second tier competitors. Furthermore, the retail banking sector’s capacity for product and service innovation is limited. Although the absence of vigorous rivalry is conducive to stability within the retail banking sector, it is likely to detract from the welfare of retail banking consumers. Furthermore, the level of innovation may not be as high as is feasible and barriers, including prudential regulatory barriers to entry or expansion, mean that the extent of rivalry is unlikely to change without some form of promotion of competition. The paper consequently makes a four-point recommendation for the removal of the ‘four pillars’ policy:  The four major banks are protected by an implicit government guarantee that impacts market operation with little observable benefit to consumers, and may be a source of consumer disutility.  The four pillars policy has prompted increased vertical integration within the sector, particularly in the area of mortgage products.  There are sufficient merger protections provided by Part IV of the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 (Cth).  Competition and contestability arise when there are reasonably low barriers to entry and exit from the sector. It is not clear that low barriers to entry exist in Australia, and evidence to support this view comes from the failure of international banks to gain a significant toehold in the retail banking sector in Australia. One deterrent to entry is the regulatory focus on the four pillars. The authors recognise that this position is at odds with the view of the Financial System Inquiry. However, the rationale in the report of the Inquiry was to prevent mergers, and the current competition law achieves this objective. The paper recommends two specific policies to promote competition in retail banking without the structural intervention that would otherwise be required to improve the intensity of competition in the retail banking sector:  Introduce bank account number portability. This would use ‘know your customer’ and central database systems in a similar form to those that have been used for mobile number portability in Australia for the last decade and a half.  Introduce customer access to data held by banks to allow third parties to compare bank offerings across all banks.  Significantly, these two recommendations are consistent with the productivity proposals issued by the UK Government in July 2015. The research paper also examines crowd equity funding as a disruptive force in the banking sector, and recommends that crowd equity funding be permitted with the following safeguards:  ASIC should take an active role in monitoring crowd equity funding and be willing to sue in case of fraudulent action.  Any intermediary online platform should have a financial services licence with limited duty of care.  There should be a cap for business raisings through crowd equity funding of $2 million in a 12-month period.  Crowd equity funding is a social phenomenon. Through its use of social media, it has attracted people who have previously never been interested in investing in companies. Instead of being feared, this interest should be nurtured through the promotion of investors’ financial education

The effect of lockup and persuasion on online investment decisions: an experimental study in ICOs

Many firms use social media (SM) to solicit online investments. In this study, we examine the interaction between SM attributes and online-investment attributes to determine how this interaction shapes users’ investment decisions. Specifically, we investigate initial coin offerings (ICOs) as an application domain of distributed ledger technology for peer-to-peer investment. We use signaling theory to develop a context-specific explanation for how the interplay of persuasion signals found in SM and technology-enforced lockups shapes individuals’ ICO investment decisions. To evaluate this interplay, we conducted a 2 × 2 factorial experiment with 473 participants. The results show that when an investment does not require a technology-enforced lockup, persuasion signals encourage investments in ICOs; however, when an investment requires a technology-enforced lockup, persuasion signals do not affect investments in ICOs. Furthermore, our analyses suggest that combining a technology-enforced lockup and persuasion signals reduces the ICO’s plausibility. This is the first study to investigate how the willingness to invest in ICOs is influenced by the relationship between technology-enforced lockups and persuasion signals. The findings have practical implications for individuals attempting to make sound decisions on ICO investments, policymakers regulating online investments, and firms seeking to attract investors

Crowdfunding Dynamics Tracking: A Reinforcement Learning Approach

Recent years have witnessed the increasing interests in research of crowdfunding mechanism. In this area, dynamics tracking is a significant issue but is still under exploration. Existing studies either fit the fluctuations of time-series or employ regularization terms to constrain learned tendencies. However, few of them take into account the inherent decision-making process between investors and crowdfunding dynamics. To address the problem, in this paper, we propose a Trajectory-based Continuous Control for Crowdfunding (TC3) algorithm to predict the funding progress in crowdfunding. Specifically, actor-critic frameworks are employed to model the relationship between investors and campaigns, where all of the investors are viewed as an agent that could interact with the environment derived from the real dynamics of campaigns. Then, to further explore the in-depth implications of patterns (i.e., typical characters) in funding series, we propose to subdivide them into $\textit{fast-growing}$ and $\textit{slow-growing}$ ones. Moreover, for the purpose of switching from different kinds of patterns, the actor component of TC3 is extended with a structure of options, which comes to the TC3-Options. Finally, extensive experiments on the Indiegogo dataset not only demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods, but also validate our assumption that the entire pattern learned by TC3-Options is indeed the U-shaped one

CREATe 2012-2016: Impact on society, industry and policy through research excellence and knowledge exchange

On the eve of the CREATe Festival May 2016, the Centre published this legacy report (edited by Kerry Patterson & Sukhpreet Singh with contributions from consortium researchers)

The formation and interplay of social capital in crowdfunded social ventures

The multi-levelled processes taking place in Crowdfunding (CF), when tapping a large heterogeneous crowd for resources, and the often fundamentally different intentions of individual crowd members in the case of highly desirable social ventures with little prospect for economic gains, may lead to a different logic and approach to how entrepreneurship develops. Using this under-institutionalized sphere as both, context and subject, the author seeks evidence and a new understanding of entrepreneurial routes by using the sociological perspectives of Bourdieus’ four forms of capital as a lens on 36 cases of social ventures. In the cases, opportunity recognition, formation and exploitation could not be distinguished as separate processes. CF and sourcing help form the actual opportunity and disperse information at the same time. In addition, the ‘nexus’ of opportunity and entrepreneur is breached in CF of social causes through the constant exchange of ideas with the crowd, leading to norm-value pairs between the funders and the entrepreneurs. Issues of identification and control are thus not based upon any formal relationship but based on perceived legitimization and offered democratic participation leading to the transformation of social capital (SC) into economic capital (EC). Success is based upon the SC of the entrepreneurial teams, yet the actual resource exchange and transformation into EC is highly moderated by cultural and symbolic capital that is being built up through the process

Communicating values: essays on trust and legitimacy as dynamic drivers of decision-making in crowdfunding

There is great consensus among scholars and practitioners alike that entrepreneurs and young ventures play an important role in tackling societal issues. Despite this, such ventures with their overarching social or environmental mission face grave difficulties when it comes to accessing external finance. This may be due to their complex value-propositions that bring with a narrative outside the traditional lines of investor/investee communication, and of course their increased liability of newness (Stinchcombe, 1965) because of novel forms of organisations with strong stakeholder participation in their governance. Crowdfunding (CF) can be seen as a fairly young financing option that aims to bridge this financing gap. It does so by focusing investors on the value-propositions of the ventures such that it connects the fund-seeking venture to the community. Because of these peculiarities it is crucial to understand how decision-making and underlying communication processes work as they are more strongly underpinned by collective and individual values. And while research has shed light on the factors that influence decision-making processes, much less attention has been paid to the communication and negotiation of the underlying values of the various actors in these processes. This thesis, in the form of a PhD by Public Works, fills this gap and provides insights into how the communication and negotiation of values between the actors influences decision-making in CF throughout the various stages of a funding campaign. It summarises and outlines five scholarly papers which address CF as an institutional space with interlinked actors and looks at decision-making processes from sociological and socio-cognitive perspectives, applying legitimacy and trust lenses. Given the nascent status of CF theory the research positions itself in an interpretative paradigm and follows an abductive methodology with qualitative methods. Based on the combined insights from the five papers the thesis ultimately provides insights into the processes of embedding and re-embedding of values in CF and by that how these values drive decision-making