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The issue of which factors influence the success or failure of crowdfunding projects is a critical topic, as it can bring founders sufficient financial support to realise their ideal innovation. We present a useful framework for two aspects of marketing (attraction-promotion and cognition-promotion) and four related factors to foster the success of reward-based crowdfunding ventures. We investigate this issue by analysing data collected from 323 funding projects from four crowdfunding platforms in Taiwan and Japan. We found that the cognition-promotion aspect obviously influenced funding success, because the factors it encompasses – signalling (including founder response, founder updates frequency and having a formal website) and kindness (including donation to other projects and rewarding sponsors) – are all significant in the logistic regression model. Regarding the attraction-promotion aspect, we found that the past experiences of the founder in terms of the attention factor do not influence funding success. Our study contributes to the literature on crowdfunding discussion platforms and engagement, and our empirical results provide a comprehensive message to the founders and sponsors of crowdfunding platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We constructed impulse purchase and cross-buying intention model using perceived usefulness, perceived playfulness, and perceived ease of use as main mediating factors and using task-relevant cues and mood-relevant cues as two independent variables. We collected 404 survey samples in accordance with the proportion of demographic statistics offered by the Market Intelligence and Consulting Institute. We indicate a major relationship from mood-relevant cues through perceived playfulness to impulse purchase intention. Apparel companies should design their differential environmental cues toward the online website, which contributes to the experiential value with their customer. Additionally, great interface design can increase perceived playfulness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The purpose of this study is to investigate the mechanism of customer relationship management to examine whether its attributes could affect relationship capital via trust-building mechanisms. We used quota sampling to survey 262 customers from Taiwan's top 10 insurance companies on the basis of customers and sales representative dyad samples. The empirical results show that social psychology–oriented trust-building mechanisms have the strongest positive effect on information sharing, mutual trust, and reciprocal commitment. Thus, sales representatives can enhance mutual disclosure with customers when customers perceive that the sales representatives are qualified and have a positive attachment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

By utilizing a sample of 44 Taiwanese banks, this study analyses whether banks can mitigate agency costs, to increase firm performance through optimization of capital structure. The stochastic frontier approach is adopted to determine cost efficiency as the firm performance indicator, an approach that is capable of controlling outside environmental factors. Furthermore, this study uses two-stage least squares to estimate two simultaneous equations that are then used to examine the relationship between capital structure and firm performance. This study includes indicators of ownership structure. The main results are: first, optimal capital structure is selected by the manager to combat the agency problem and thus improve performance, yielding results consistent with agency theory; and second, reducing managerial share ownership will decrease agency cost and increase firm performance, a finding that is consistent with the Entrenchment Hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we adopt a stochastic cost frontier method to investigate the influence of off-balance sheet (OBS) activities on the cost efficiency of Taiwan's banks. We estimate and compare cost inefficiency with or without OBS outputs of 46 Taiwanese commercial banks during the period, 1998 through 2001. The conclusions of this empirical study are as follows. First, omitting off-balance sheet outputs in estimating the cost frontier function of banks results in an underestimation of bank efficiency by approximately 5 per cent. Second, large banks are associated with a higher cost efficiency and have an increased ability to develop OBS activities. This is consistent with Taiwan's regulatory policies, which focus on promoting efficiency in the banking industry of emerging markets. Banks with higher employee productivity are also more cost efficient. Finally, we observe evidence of economies of scale in both models with or without OBS specification in Taiwan's bank industry. Economies of scope between loans and OBS outputs are also observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]