Understanding the Effect of Fundraising Goals on Crowdfunding Behavior

All The online crowdfunding industry has witnessed phenomenal growth since the debut of Kickstarter in 2009. Most online crowdfunding platforms were created to use as an effective channel for early-stage entrepreneurial firms to obtain required pledges from passionate backers to bring new ideas to life. In this paper, taking the presence of each campaign’s fundraising goal as given, we empirically investigate the effect of fundraising goals on backers’ supporting behavior. The fundraising goal represents the minimum amount of funds team members of a project need to complete the project and make and ship any rewards. Our investigation utilizes a set of data collected from Kickstater.com during a time period. For each campaign, project characteristics, fundraising goal levels, and real-time updated numbers of backers are posted on the website. These data provide us with an opportunity to infer the effects of fundraising goals from the backing patterns over time