مکانیزم های بازار و دینامیک مالی در بازار سرمایه
Abstract
1- Introduction
2- Equity crowdfunding in Germany
3- Hypotheses
4- Data and methods
5- Result
6- Conclusions
References
Abstract
Equity crowdfunding is a new form of entrepreneurial finance, in which investors do not receive perks or engage in pre-purchase of the product, but rather participate in the future cash flows of a firm. In this paper, we analyze what determines individual investment decisions in this new financial market. One important factor that may influence the behavior of investors is the way the portal allocates securities. We use unique data from four German equity crowdfunding portals to examine how the allocation mechanism affects funding dynamics. In contrast with the crowdfunding campaigns on Kickstarter, on which the typical pattern of project support is U shaped, we find that equity crowdfunding dynamics are L shaped under a first-come, first-served mechanism and U shaped under a second-price auction. The evidence also shows that investors base their decisions on information provided by the entrepreneur in the form of updates as well as by the investment behavior and comments of other crowd investors.
Introduction
In recent years, crowdfunding has become a mainstream source of funding for early-stage firms. Equity crowdfunding (also referred to as investment-based crowdfunding, securitiesbased crowdfunding, and crowdinvesting) is a sub-category of crowdfunding in which firms issue financial securities to satisfy their capital needs. At this point, empirical research on equity crowdfunding is still scarce, because this market segment was not available until only recently to the general crowd in jurisdictions such as the United States or lacked specific regulation elsewhere to facilitate its development (Hornuf and Schwienbacher, 2017b). Some seminal articles on equity crowdfunding have described the size, growth, and geographic distributions of the market (Vulkan et al., 2016; Günther et al., 2017), have analyzed the static factors that affect funding success based on ultimate campaign outcome (Ahlers et al., 2015; Hornuf and Schwienbacher, 2017a), and have provided first insights into the returns on investment (Hornuf and Schmitt, 2016; Signori and Vismara, 2016). Agrawal et al. (2016) show that syndicates help well-informed lead investors in equity crowdfunding extend their knowledge to a less well-informed crowd that is consequently willing to invest in a company. In a similar vein, Vismara (2017) evidences that founders have a greater chance of reaching the funding goal in an equity crowdfunding campaign if they possess more social capital as measured by the number of the founder’s LinkedIn connections. More recently, scholars have focused on the dynamic effects of equity crowdfunding. As the first researcher to assess dynamics in equity offerings, Vismara (2017) shows that information cascades among individual investors are an important factor in the equity crowdfunding investment process. By running a cross-sectional analysis on the portal Crowdcube, he finds that investments in the early days of a campaign are important in attracting investors later on and consequently increase the probability of funding success. These findings highlight the existence of dynamic effects within campaigns that are generally overlooked in other studies. Another recent article investigates whether information disclosure in the form of updates affects the investment dynamics on Companisto and Seedmatch (Block et al., 2017). The authors find that startups can provide credible information about their quality when posting updates about their new developments, such as funding events, business developments, and cooperation projects.