Trust Building on Charitable Crowdfunding Platforms_The Case of Qfund

Charitable crowdfunding platforms allow individuals and organizations to raise funds from a large and distributed group of potential donors. In this context, trust is a critical factor that influences the relationship between the three main stakeholders: the donors, the recipients, and the platform. To enhance our understanding of trust building in the charitable crowdfunding context, this paper builds on a case study of Qfund, a popular charitable crowdfunding platform in China. Based on the case analysis, we develop a framework of trust in charitable crowdfunding that is constituted of four dimensions of trust: relational, dispositional, contextual, and calculative trust. We discuss the underlying mechanisms for each of these types of trust and highlight the contributions of the study to the literature on charitable crowdfunding