Investors’ Inertia Behavior and Their Repeated Decision-Making in Online Reward-Based Crowdfunding Market

Abstract Extending recent work on individual-level decisions in the emerged reward-based crowdfunding market, we formulated a Panel Vector Auto Regression Model with exogenous variables to examine whether investors' Inertia Behavior (IB) exists in their repeated investment decisions (i.e., which reward tier to select and when to invest). If so, how to quantify the effect of this behavior and how investors' heterogeneity moderates the effect of this behavior. We collected a novel and individual-level dataset from a leading crowdfunding market. Our analysis suggests the existence of investors' IB. Furthermore, we also found that (1) Investors' IB in reward tier selection seems to be stronger than that in investment timing selection. (2) Investors' platform tenure significantly accentuates their IB reward tier selection, but weakens that in investment timing selection. (3) Project attributes related factors have different impacts on investors' decision-making and peer investors' influence have stronger impact on backers' investment timing selection when compared with fundraisers' marketing efforts. Our results provide implications for crowdfunding participants including investors, fundraisers and the crowdfunding intermediaries hosting them.