The motivational foundations of lenders : social lending through Crowdfunding Platforms

• Autor(a) principal: Pires, Filipe Estrela
• Data de Publicação: 2013
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/16774
• topic: Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

Thanks to the development of the Web 2.0, the new-generation interactive web focuses on involving its users as value-creating agents. As such, the way companies do business online and interact with their customers has also been changing. Organizations can rely on this technology to innovate and create new distributed business models that are also profitable and sustainable (Villarroel & Gorbatai 2011a, 2011b). As such, a recent organizational concept, crowdsourcing, enables firms to make an open call to source ideas, work, etc. from the crowd. In particular, as the concept found new areas of application, it is now possible to source the crowd for funding through “crowdfunding” platforms. This thesis focuses on social lending initiatives - in which individual members of the crowd support social causes and other individuals, helping them to get funding for their projects through crowdfunding platforms. The aim is to study the motivational foundations of lenders. The results show that social lenders’ motivations are intrinsic in nature. On one hand, lenders do contribute more often in social lending initiatives if: they have humanitarian and altruistic values; need to protect their ego from the negative features of the self; and if they enjoy and have fun during the process of investing. On the other hand, when it comes to extrinsic motivations, lenders do participate less often when they have social pressure; or when they feel they have to protect others from the negative features of their lives. In order to contribute more times and support more projects, lenders must be intrinsically motivated, since extrinsic motivations make them feel oblidged to help, which decreases their frequency of participation.