Resumen de The investor-entrepreneur relationship in equity crowdfunding: a combined trust-agency based approach /
Crowdfunding is considered a new source of funding and it is becoming an increasingly employed tool by entrepreneurs who seek financing for their venture and by investors who search for non-traditional alternatives of investment. The crowdfunding phenomenon, in theory and practice, has developed and spread significantly in recent years. Equity crowdfunding promises to transform the private funding landscape for start-ups and early stage projects allowing non-experience investors to participate in funding a project. However, these type of investors have limited tools to identify cases of fraud and misconduct, evaluate the value proposition of projects or sell their participation in a liquid secondary market. This doctoral dissertation has the purpose to advance knowledge and understanding on the investors’ decision-making assessment when investing in equity crowdfunding. This study was structured and design through three independent essays. Each essay intends to explore one characteristic of the equity crowdfunding phenomenon and includes its own methodology, analysis and empirical results.
The objective of the first essay is to study the characteristics of the investors willing to fund start-ups through crowdfunding platforms. We found and identified as significant factors to categorize the investors both their expertise in equity crowdfunding and their risk diversification strategy. The objective of the second essay is to evaluate the investors’ development of trust based on their beliefs about the competence, integrity and benevolence of the entrepreneur seeking financing through the equity crowdfunding model. The novelty of this research was to analyze “trust” in the equity crowdfunding ecosystem. We use a structural equation modelling technique to predict the relationship among our trust latent variables and the trust intention to invest in equity crowdfunding projects. Essay three focuses on analyzing the combined effect of trust and agency relations among investors, entrepreneurs and crowdfunding platforms. In this essay we add the agency constructs to the trust constructs commented for the second essay objective. The agency constructs are built on the research of agency dynamics for start-up financing in business angel, venture capitalist investment and crowdfunding models, and comprise a combination of ex-ante and ex-post investment factors. We tested our hypothesis using a partial least square-structural equation modeling. We found that there is an innate characteristic of the investor to trust in the equity crowdfunding ecosystem and that the investors have found mechanisms that allow them to identify potential flaws and cases of fraud present in certain equity crowdfunding projects.
Based on the research findings, this dissertation contributes to knowledge in different ways: First, a better description of the investor characteristics; second, we embrace the conclusion that the variable collective trust represented through the equity crowdfunding platforms performs an important part in explaining the trust intentions of the investors; third, we combine two very well-known theories, trust and agency, that even though they are complementary they have not been utilized in research together sufficiently.
