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...

The aim of this thesis is to analyze crowdfunding campaigns on Kickstarter, and contribute towards increasing the effectiveness of such campaigns, as most campaigns are unsuccessful. The theoretical part will focus on defining crowdfunding as the new phenomena of capital distribution and compared with other forms of financing new ideas. The empirical part focuses on a paired comparison analysis of campaigns from two various locations and three industries in total. Factores affecting the successfulness are analyzed and a pattern which would help towards solving the initial problem is looked for. The aim of the thesis was fulfilled by giving recommendations which have an impact on the success rate.

Crowdfunding has become an alternative source of funding for small medium enterprises (SMEs) due to inadequate or lack of finance at its start-up. There has been lot of analysis by scholars pertaining the determinants of crowdfunding success and the objective of this theory is to pinpoint the factors of a successful crowdfunding project based on the most analyzed determinants by prior researchers (technology-based projects, social media and entertainment-based projects, other projects (such as food, publishing, arts), visual features (such as pictures, comments, updates, videos,etc), as well as investors contribution. Also, to find out if the analysis of prior researchers are in line with the result of our analysis, we based our study on a sample of 1000 projects inclined on a crowdfunding platform (kickstarter) as at 2019. The econometric models used for the analysis were based on logit model, linear probability model, mean difference test and probit regression model (to serve as a check on robustness). The result of our analysis was indeed in line with prior research (Mollick, 2014; Schwienbacher et al., 2014, etc) except for technology-based projects. The outcome of our analysis depicts that the higher investors contribution, the higher the success of crowdfunding. Nevertheless, technology-based projects are less reliable and are less funded on kickstarter platform; thereby, having a low success rate on crowdfunding platforms. More funds were also made on projects relating to social media and entertainment (M&E) and other projects such as publishing, food,etc. The result of the probit regression shows a correct check on the analysis made even though, there might be slight differences in figures as compared to the result of the logit regression. The result of the probability of success rates of projects based on our four main variables of interest was 75% averagely for both logit and probit regressions performed. Start-ups (SMEs) frequently achieve a higher funding support depending on their projects at hand and this can be absolutely motivated by the presence of a high social media networks (thus, founder's link through Facebook, LinkedIn,Twitter and projects related to entertainment). Hence, from our analysis, the determinants of success of crowdfunding projects included high investors contribution, social media and entertainment projects, as well as, social media networks, project funding goal, project updates, project description and country selection of projects. Also, we found out that, project duration and visual description of projects such as images and videos do not contribute to the funding success of crowdfunding on kickstarter platform. / No