Improving Sponsor's Experience in Reward-Based Crowdfunding: A Psychological Ownership Perspective

Psychological ownership brings new perspective to understand individual behaviors in organization, team, and the information system areas. In this research we use this theory to investigate how to improve sponsor experience in the context of reward-based crowdfunding. We propose that psychological ownership is one important mental state for sponsors in crowdfunding. The research model in this study shows that psychological ownership could predict sponsor’s commitment to project and continuous intention to contribute to it. Sponsors can develop the feeling of psychological ownership through three routes, i.e., perceived control, intimate knowing, and self-investment. In addition, social capital (sponsor expertise, social trust in entrepreneur and social ties) and social interaction (sponsor participation and entrepreneur activeness) are hypothesized to be important antecedents to the routes to psychological ownership in crowdfunding. The research model and hypotheses will be tested with survey data from www.zhongchou.cn, a famous crowdfunding platform in China. The expected research findings would provide interesting implications for research and practice.