School of Business

Entrepreneurs' facial trustworthiness, gender, and crowdfunding success

Document Type

Article

Abstract

This study examines whether and how entrepreneurs' facial trustworthiness is associated with the success of their crowdfunding campaigns. We adopt a novel dataset extracted from the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform and employ machine learning-based facial detection techniques to construct a comprehensive index that measures facial trustworthiness for our investigation. Our results suggest that entrepreneurs' facial trustworthiness is positively associated with crowdfunding campaign success. Specifically, trustworthy-looking entrepreneurs receive a 13.1% greater pledge amount and attract 4.8% more backers in their crowdfunding campaign as compared to those who are untrustworthy-looking. We also find that the facial trustworthiness of female entrepreneurs plays a more prominent role in determining project success than that of male entrepreneurs. Our results are robust to a series of additional analyses and sensitivity checks. Overall, the results of our study suggest that entrepreneurs' facial trustworthiness is an important factor that affects funders' decision-making process in reward-based crowdfunding.

Publication Title

Journal of Corporate Finance

Publication Date

10-2020

Volume

64

ISSN

0929-1199

DOI

10.1016/j.jcorpfin.2020.101693

Keywords

crowdfunding, facial trustworthiness perception, gender

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