What motivates people to fund crowdfunding projects?: How funders make decisions on the basis of certain project characteristics

In this thesis I’ve tried to uncover the question what motivates backers to fund a crowdfunding project. Firstly, some predictions were made on the basis of an economic model. The empirical analysis of an extensive dataset of Kickstarter project found relationships between multiple project characteristics. Firstly, the relationship between the height of the goal and the probability of success is decreasingly negative. The same goes for the relationship between the goal and the percentage funded. Reason for this is probably because people do not like it when there is a lot of uncertainty about whether a project will reach its goal or not. The relationship between the goals and the amount of backers and the goal and the average amount funded seems to be concave. Additionally, we have seen in the results of the survey that the characteristic “Time left” therefore seems to have a concave effect preference wise.