Crowdfunding is a relative new phenomenon where the crowd is tapped for money. This study focus on reward based crowdfunding on Kickstarter and Indiegogo in a context where new product ideas are launched. The purpose is to find out what makes a campaign successful, and create a model that can be used in the creation and execution of new crowdfunding campaigns. Empirical case studies, where six different crowdfunding campaigns was studied and people behind them was interviewed, have been carried out. Crowdfunding in this context turns out rather to be used as a marketing tool, with the ability to test products against the market and to create word-of-mouth, public relations and publicity, than just a source of funding. A key factor to a successful project is the effort made in order to expose the campaign and product to the target market. Since the importance of a good start of this work can with advantage start some time prior to launch. The design of the page, that is the description of the project which include the video which is shown Kickstarter or Indiegogo, is also an important aspect that has been studied. This can preferably include information product features and benefits, references to outside recommendations, which is why the team behind the product are the right people to undertake the project and to through identification with the target audience and use emotional words arouse the readers feelings. The lessons and conclusions that could be drawn from a model in the form of a checklist of good advice provided to be used by entrepreneurs that will use crowdfunding.

Legal regulation of crowdfunding in the Czech Republic The thesis deals with the legal regulation of crowdfunding in the Czech Republic as well as in the European Union with emphasis on the investment type of crowdfunding, mostly for purpose of identifying all relevant legal acts and evaluating their form and application in terms of suitability and sufficiency. The first part generally addresses explanation of the term crowdfunding itself, the etymological interpretation, its origins, the historical development and the concepts of crowdfunding with other relative and superior terms. This section also includes division of crowdfunding into individual types and subtypes. Each of them is explained separately including examples of already existing crowdfunding platforms. The second part comprises of all legal acts and other regulation applicable to most of crowdfunding platforms and, in more detail, discusses legislation relevant to the investment type of crowdfunding (equity-based and securities-based crowdfunding). These come from several areas of financial law. The focus of the work is aimed at legal regulation of payment services, financial instruments (including prospectus regulation) and collective investment. The thesis reflects both national and EU legislation, including their relation through...

Crowdfunding is heralded as ‘the next big thing’ in venture capital, advocating the democratisation of capital access for entrepreneurs through online mechanisms. However, current research indicates that entrepreneurs experience high failure rates in crowdfunding, similar to ‘traditional’ venture capital approaches. This stresses the need for investigations that unveil why some crowdfunding campaigns succeed and others fail. This thesis examines entrepreneurial activities associated with capital assembly through crowdfunding and comprises a portfolio of three empirical studies. These may be read independently or conjointly, the latter of which allows for a more nuanced understanding of entrepreneurial crowdfunding. The first study adopts an explorative quantitative research approach, utilising records of 421 crowdfunding campaigns published on Kickstarter, a leading reward-based online crowdfunding platform. Various crowdfunding campaign characteristics are investigated to analyse how these features drive fundraising performance and outcomes. Findings reveal that entrepreneurs can exploit particular online pitch elements to create a project narrative, which enables them to establish project legitimacy within the context of crowdfunding platform communities. The second study utilises a dataset of 81,829 crowdfunding campaigns and multivariate and probit analysis methods to examine the role of the entrepreneurs’ network size and the quality of the network relationship for capital assembly and fundraising outcome in crowdfunding. The analysis demonstrates that the quality of the network relationship, in addition to the size of the network, contributes to crowdfunding performance and outcomes. Results show that the relationship between the quality of the network relationship, the size of the network and capital assembly in crowdfunding are positive. Further, the results highlight that the addition of network relationship quality specifications improve the explanation of variation in capital assembly. This suggests that estimations that do not include network relationship variables are ineffective in explaining how entrepreneurs can facilitate capital assembly and achieve success in crowdfunding. Accordingly, the study emphasises the role and importance of network relationship quality activities as additional determinants of crowdfunding outcomes. This study enunciates the importance for entrepreneurs to form ‘project-syndicates’, a project-related community that co-creates the project narrative and legitimacy, leading to better fundraising performance and outcomes. The third study complements the two previously discussed quantitative studies by comprising qualitative data that elicits interpretations over a twenty-four month period in a longitudinal single case study. This study investigates the role, behaviour and experience of entrepreneurs during the crowdfunding process and relates entrepreneurial activities to fundraising performance. This study reveals three identity strategies, demonstrating how the entrepreneur can leapfrog from one side of the bimodal funding distribution in crowdfunding to the other extreme following an identity transition. This study sheds light on the entrepreneurial micro-foundations of crowdfunding by focusing on the entrepreneur’s processes pre-, during and post-crowdfunding. As such, this research provides valuable insights into entrepreneurial crowdfunding. This thesis, taken as a whole, contributes to the understanding of entrepreneurial capital assembly through crowdfunding, and develops new theory that advances the current knowledge of crowdfunding performance and outcomes. As such, this thesis contributes to entrepreneurship theory by investigating crowdfunding from three different perspectives, utilising theories related to entrepreneurial narratives and legitimacy, networking and role identity to study the unique context of crowdfunding, where much remains to be explored.

Equity crowdfunding är ett relativt outforskat fenomen, men trots detta finns det viss forskning på ämnet. Den forskning som tidigare har gjorts är utifrån ett traditionellt synsätt på organisationer. Vi ville med hjälp av en kvalitativ studie undersöka och skapa förståelse för vilka andra värden och betydelser än ekonomiskt kapital som aktörer förknippar med equity crowdfunding. Vi hade en viss förförståelse och ville med hjälp av denna skapa en djupare förståelse. Därför valde vi att intervjua fem aktörer som alla har en koppling till bolag som genomfört en equity crowdfunding-kampanj. Med hjälp av ostrukturerade intervjuer lät vi respondenterna tala fritt om sina erfarenheter och utifrån detta kunde vi sedan bilda vår teoretiska referensram. De teman som vi funnit utifrån vår empiri är symboler, identitet, gränser, makt, socialt kapital samt humankapital.

McMaster University MASTER OF ARTS (2020) Hamilton, Ontario (Philosophy) TITLE: Funding the future? Ethical considerations for the use of research-focused crowdfunding platforms AUTHOR: Rachel Katz, B.A. (McMaster University) SUPERVISOR: Dr. Claudia Emerson NUMBER OF PAGES: xi, 106 / Crowdfunding is an online fundraising tool that allows individuals or groups to collect donations from individuals both in and beyond their immediate networks, usually facilitated by social media. While many crowdfunding platforms support a panoply of projects, there are others that cater specifically to researchers. In this thesis, I evaluate a number of ethical and social issues related to the growth in popularity of these platforms. I discuss the issues of governance, accountability and trust, and transparency. I argue that currently, these platforms cannot be said to operate in a manner that indicates strong governance, and add that crowdfunding lacks the built-in accountability mechanisms of more traditional funding avenues such as grant-based funding. As a result, crowdfunding requires the building of trust between researchers, donors, and the platforms themselves. I conclude this section by arguing that better transparency may provide a way for crowdfunding to become a more trustworthy style of funding. I also critique the claims that crowdfunding can resolve a number of social inequalities related to income, experience, and global development. I dedicate a chapter to this critique and argue that despite claims that crowdfunding is currently democratizing research, there are still a number of issues that demonstrate that crowdfunding is not currently the “great equalizer” many claim it to be. This project marks one of the first long-form efforts to critically evaluate the conduct of crowdfunding platforms that specialize in funding for research, and I present and defend the view that while potentially beneficial for individuals and institutions, crowdfunding for research cannot continue to exist as a “Wild West”. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA) / Crowdfunding is an online fundraising tool that allows organizations to collect funds from a broad range of individuals. While many crowdfunding platforms support a panoply of projects, there are others that cater specifically to researchers. Due to the novelty of crowdfunding as a financial resource for researchers, a number of important, complex issues surrounding its use have yet to be addressed and a number of ethical questions have yet to be answered. This project marks one of the first efforts to evaluate the ethical concerns associated with the use of crowdfunding platforms to support the production of research. I highlight ethical issues that pertain to governance, trust and accountability, and transparency, along with a number of other pressing issues related to social inequalities. Crowdfunding has the potential to revolutionize how research is produced and funded, but it cannot be allowed to persist as an online space with so few rules.

Vi avser att utreda skatteverkets ställningstagande i fråga om moms vid belöningsbaserad crowdfunding. Syftet är att diskutera om , och i vilka fall, moms i samband med belöningsbaserad crowdfunding ska erläggas.

Au cours de ces vingt dernières années le secteur de la microfinance au niveau global a crû de manière exponentielle. Il a permis à des millions de personnes à faibles revenus et exclues du secteur de la finance traditionnelle, de mieux lisser leur consommation et d'investir pour améliorer leur bien-être. Cependant au cours de cette même période, le secteur de la microfinance a aussi été frappé par des crises de repaiement et un certain nombre d'institutions de microfinance (IMFs) ont vu leur taux de défaut augmenter de manière alarmante. Il est ainsi crucial d'avoir une connaissance approfondie des determinants du risque au niveau macro et micro. Cette thèse, apporte une contribution dans ce sens en étudiant les risques de crédit au niveau du secteur et au niveau des empreunteurs en microfinance. Dans le premier chapitre, nous suggérons une nouvelle mesure de risque systémique pour le marché du microcrédit. Nous explorons ensuite les déterminants de ce risque pour 37 pays de 2000 à 2014. Pour ce faire, nous modélisons, la distribution jointe de la qualité du portefeuille de toutes les IMFs dans un pays donné en utilisant une copule équidépendante semi-paramétrique. Notre mesure est basée sur l'idée qu'une plus forte dépendance de la qualité du portefeuille dans un pays est un indicateur de fagilité dans le secteur. Nous montrons qu'après avoir controlé pour les effets pays, la concurrence, le niveau de pénétration du marché, la commercialisation, la croissance excessive du secteur ainsi qu'un fort taux d'intérêt augmente la fragilité du secteur. Dans le second chapitre, nous utilisons des données de la plateforme de microfinance Kiva.org pour évaluer le taux de défaut des prêts que les IMFs postent sur la platforme. Nous identifions, d'abord que les prêts de plus longue durée ont un taux de défaut plus élevés, deuxièmement, que le taux de défaut baisse avec l'âge de l'emprunteur et finalement que les délais de grâce augmentent le taux de défaut pour les prêts de groupe avec une fréquence de remboursement mensuelle.L'évaluation des politiques publiques est particulière difficile notamment lorsque celles-ci affectent un grand nombre de personnes et ont des effets non-marginaux. Le troisième chapitre de cette thèse apporte une contribution à cette littérature en estimant l'effet d'une politique éducative visant à donner plus de choix d'écoles aux ménages sur le prix de la qualité des lycées en Corée du Sud. Plus précisément, nous utilisons une approche hédonique pour estimer l'effet de la politique éducative sur le prix d'équilibre de la qualité des lycée à Séoul. Notre stratégie d'identification repose sur des effets spatiaux précis comme des gratte-ciel d'appartements à Séoul. C'est effets nous permettent d'estimer le prix d'équilibre de la qualité des lycées avant et après la politique sans avoir à se reposer sur la politique elle-même comme stratégie d'identification. Ainsi, nous mitigeons le biais dû au fait que les ménages se répartissent en fonction de leur préférence pour les biens localement distribués. Nous estimons que cette politique de choix d'école diminue le prix d'équilibre de la qualité des lycées de USD 26 871 en moyenne. / The last 20 years have witnessed an exponential growth of the microfinance sector at the global level. In so doing, it has provided millions of poor people previously excluded from the traditional financial sector a better way to smooth their consumption and to invest to improve their livelihood.However, over the same period, the microfinance sector has also been hit by a series of repayment crises, and many microfinance institutions have seen an increase in their default rates at the microlevel. It is therefore important to have a better understanding of the determinants of risk in the microfinance sector. In this thesis, we address this issue by exploring the determinant of risk at the macro and microlevel. In the first chapter we introduce a new copula-based measure of systemic credit risk in microcredit markets and explore its determinants for 37 countries from 2000 to 2014. We model the joint distribution of portfolio quality of all microfinance institutions (MFIs) in a givencountry using an equidependent copula and an empirical density for the marginal. Our methodology is based on the idea that a higher level of dependence among MFIs in a given country is an indicator of potential fragility of the sector.We show that, after controlling for country effects, measures of competition, market penetration, commercialization and excessive growth of the sector, as well as the level of interest rates charged by MFIs in a country all increase the fragility of the microfinance sector, while lending to more women tends to reduce systemic risk. With this measure of systemic risk, we further compute the probability that a proportion of at least 20% of MFIs in a country are in serious financial distress and our simulations capture a progressive increase in risk in many countries that experienced a repayment crisis. In the second chapter, we use data from the microfinance crowdfunding platform Kiva to analyze the determinants of microfinance borrower defaults in a broad range of microfinance institutions in different countries. We use loan and borrower characteristics, downloaded from Kiva.org, to evaluate the repayment rates of the loans, that MFIs post on the platform. We identify, firstly that loans with longer durations have higher default, secondly that default rates decrease with the age of the borrower. Finally we find that grace periods increase default rates for group loans with monthly repayment frequency while the effect goes the other way with a weekly repayment frequency.The evaluation of public policies is challenging, particularly when these policies are meant to have wide scale and non-marginal effects. The third chapter of this thesis contribute to this literature by estimating the effect of the implementation of an open school choice program in South Korea. To be more specific we use a hedonic approach to estimate the effect of a high school choice program on the equilibrium price of high school quality in Seoul. Our identification strategy makes use of fine scale spatial effects such as clusters of skyscrapers apartment buildings and allows us to estimate the equilibrium price of high school quality before and after the school choice program without relying on the policy itself as an instrument.By allowing the spatial effects to differ before and after the policy, this strategy also mitigates the bias due to the sorting behavior of households that is likely to happen in the case of policies of such scales. We find that the policy decreases the equilibrium price of high school quality by USD 26,871 on average.

Crowdfunding is a way of financing a project when money is raised from a large number of small contributors. The main objective of this thesis is to identify key contributing factors of success of a crowdfunding campaign based on statistical analysis of projects on HitHit.cz. As a further contribution, this thesis aims to provide recommendations on how to create a successful crowdfunding campaign, as well as to review characteristics associated with the biggest crowdfunding portals in the USA and Czech Republic.

The new trend of Crowdfunding is worldwide changing the market for start-ups, as well as small- and medium-sized enterprises to finance their business, as well as increasing the opportunities and possibilities for realizing ideas. Thus, this thesis aims to enlighten the concept of Crowdfunding and its effects. Especially, the interrelation of the concepts of Crowdfunding, Entrepreneurship and Leadership is of utmost importance in this research. As a result of this relation a new era of leaders, differentiating themselves from other leaders by their specific skills and behaviours, gained through the act of Crowdfunding, is initiated. Those skills and behaviours are included in their leading of others in newly crowdfunded ventures.In order to analyse this further, qualitative research and empirical data was used, including interviews with experts as well as crowdfunded entrepreneurs. Furthermore, academic literature as well as insights gained from an online Crowdfunding community built the basis for elaborating this concept further.Concluding the following results were achieved. 1.) Crowdfunding can be perceived as a process, being based in the interaction between the entrepreneur and the crowd and is influenced by particular forces. 2.) Entrepreneurs, funding their idea via Crowdfunding, develop specific skills and behaviours impacting their development as leaders. Hence, also their act of leading in newly crowdfunded ventures. These results indicate that a new era of leaders, showing distinctive leadership skills and behaviours, has begun.

Crowdfunding is a method for financing a product, investment or project. It means that all people, individuals or companies that have an idea and Internet connection can outsource the idea on a crowdfunding platform. The purpose with this crowdfunding is that the creator turn to many people with small amounts of money. This paper focus on the users of crowdfunding platforms though. There are a lot of articles on the Internet about Crowdfunding but not so much information about the users. In a try to identify the people who uses this kind of financial method I have made a survey with 200 respondents. In the empirical chapter, every single question and the answer is displayed in a respective figure.