AbstractsBusiness Management & Administration

Crowdfunding is a relatively new and exciting way to get investments for a business startup or other project. We use the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) to explore how individuals are persuaded by the project videos on a crowdfunding platform called Kickstarter. ELM is a psychological model used to understand how people are persuaded. Our results support most of our hypotheses and showed that the need for cognition, which reflects the personal tendency towards the central route of ELM, does increase an individual’s intent to back a project. We also discovered that intrinsic motivations and product quality have a stronger effect on intent to back a project than extrinsic motivations and argument quality respectively. These results should be investigated further. Our study contributes to research on the aspects of the crowdfunding website and how they impact successfully funding a project. Our findings can also be applied to current entrepreneurial practices, we make suggestions for crowdfunding sites and project creators. Advisors/Committee Members: Gregory D. Moody, Kimberly A. Barchard, Han-Fen Hu, Hans Rawhouser, Marcus Rothenberger.