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A key challenge faced by entrepreneurs is financing the venture for which equity crowdfunding presents an alternative with relatively low entry barriers. While it has recently been shown that perceived personality traits of the entrepreneur can impact crowdfunding success, so far, little is known about which perceived personality traits drive funding success in the context of sustainable ventures, which this study explores. To answer this question, through the lens of asymmetric information, we use quantitative regression analysis of U.S.-based equity crowdfunding projects. Overall, our preliminary results suggest an interaction between sustainability and the negatively perceived personality trait (neuroticism) on equity crowdfunding funding success. Further, we replicate recent findings on the role of negatively perceived personality traits in crowdfunding. This study contributes to our knowledge of the role of the entrepreneur's perceived personality and communication in successfully financing sustainable ventures via equity crowdfunding, bringing us closer to co-creating sustainable digital futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has shown that cognitive, normative, and regulative legitimacy are important for new market emergence. Little known, however, are the conditions and dynamics under which these three forms of legitimacy interact over time and in different institutional settings. In this study, we investigate the emergence and development of the new market for cryptocurrencies (i.e., Bitcoin) using a comprehensive dataset on trading in 49 countries between 2010 and 2020. Our study reveals that all three forms of legitimacy drive Bitcoin trading. Surprisingly, we also found increases in trading volume when Bitcoin was declared illegal and when normative support preceded, rather than followed, regulative legitimacy. Our results shed light on the relationship between cognitive, normative, and regulative legitimacy and their interactions in the emergence and development of a new contested market over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Implicit personality representations play a crucial role in shaping how investors perceive entrepreneurs and subsequently invest in their projects. We investigate the relationship between perceived Big Five personality signals and funding success utilizing a sample of 709 US-based equity crowdfunding campaigns. We find that higher conscientiousness, lower neuroticism, extraversion, and openness serve as funding success signals, significantly affecting both the funding level and number of investors attracted. This study extends the literature on the relationship between perceived personality signals and entrepreneurial finance by demonstrating the context-dependence of personality signals. The results fuel arguments that equity crowdfunding gears towards classical venture financing and is less comparable to reward-based crowdfunding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developing and keeping a community motivated is critical for success, particularly in self-hosted crowdfunding. Existing research has identified social capital as an important driver of such endeavors. However, the process of how social capital can be developed, managed, and targeted towards a common goal in digital settings is mostly unknown. Applying social exchange theory and a mixed-methods approach, we leverage a large dataset of one of the world's most-funded crowdfunding projects - Star Citizen - to zoom in on the process of social capital development as a success factor. We depict how repeated social exchange and reciprocity norms foster the emergence of a cohesive and supportive community from a crowd of strangers. Moreover, we explain how this is used by Start Citizen within five themes of a novel and IS-enabled managerial technique focusing on dreams. Our insights generalize to contexts beyond crowdfunding that require the engagement of crowds for joint value creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expressed personality traits can play a pivotal role in shaping how the entrepreneurs' narratives are perceived by investors. Using a sample of 709 campaigns collected from four leading US-based equity crowdfunding websites and enriched with corresponding pitch videos and S.E.C. data, this study investigates the relationship between personality traits signaled by entrepreneurs to investors and subsequent funding success of equity crowdfunding campaigns. Of the Big Five personality traits, in particular, we find that higher conscientiousness, lower neuroticism, extraversion, and surprisingly lower openness seem to serve as signals of equity crowdfunding success, significantly affecting both the funding amount received and the number of investors attracted by campaigns. Moreover, we find that the information volume of a given campaign amplifies the negative effect of perceived neuroticism on funding success, suggesting a role for negativity bias. Partly challenging conventional wisdom, this study extends the literature on the relationship between personality and entrepreneurial finance by providing new input to a longstanding and central debate on the impact of individual-level components upon entrepreneurial outcomes in the underexplored alternative finance market and by demonstrating the context-dependent nature of personality signals within their respective investment contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research shows that learning performance enhancing stewardship behavior in family firms is frequently achieved through the experiences gained inside the firm prior to succession. However, upper echelons research on managerial decision making shows that this experience inside the family firm may lead to cognitive biases which decrease firm performance. This study addresses these two opposing views via using a sample of 804 German family firms. Our findings reveal that the detrimental effects of cognitive biases arising from pre-succession firm experience have overall a negative impact on post-succession family firm performance. However, this relationship is moderated by different individual and firm level factors. In particular, our results show a u-shaped impact for a non-family successor and a successor with academic education. Furthermore, the overall negative effect of pre-succession firm experience is aggravated for firms introducing product innovations and firms operating in dynamic high R&D intensive industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on legitimacy in institutional theory research, we theorize how the perception of regulative legitimacy based on strong versus weak government regulations varies in conjunction with institutional voids, country level corruption and trust and its implications on the emergence of the market for cryptocurrencies (i.e. Bitcoin trading) from 2013 to 2017 in 45 countries. We find that strong regulations based on the declaration of Bitcoins as either legal or illegal makes Bitcoin trading in a country less attractive ' even under high corruption. However, in the context of institutional voids strong regulations facilitate Bitcoin trading while in the context of high social trust, strong regulations hamper it. Our study contributes to a better understanding of new market emergence and the tension between (il)legality and (il)legitimacy in different institutional settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]