How linguistic cues affect the motivation of capital-giving in crowdfunding: a self-determination theory perspective

ABSTRACT The crowdfunding success depends on the collective capital giving by investors, and such behaviours are triggered by certain motivations. Thus we expect to identify investors’ motivation by exploring linguistic cues from project descriptions and examine what kinds of linguistic cues affect capital-giving decisions. Our research is based on self-determination theory, which falls human needs into one of two types, intrinsic motives or extrinsic motives. We create a word corpus and use it to classify the project descriptions into different motivations through text analytics. Finally, an econometric model is formulated to estimate the impact of investors’ motives on the fundraising success. Our empirical analyses demonstrate that the investors’ motivations for capital-giving vary in project categories. Furthermore, building relation and receiving gratitude are amongst the key determinants of investors’ involvement in crowdfunding, especially for community projects and creative works.