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NTU Management Review Vol. 32 No. 2 Aug. 2022

Hypothesis 2: Project legitimacy weakens the negative relationship between the
bystander ratio of a project and the project pledge amount.

2.3 Interplay of Bystander Effects and Project Duration

The bystander effect literature suggests that if people know there are other bystanders
in an emergent situation, the responsibility for helping would be diffused among them.
Prior studies suggest that bystanders are more likely to take action in less ambiguous

situations than in more ambiguous ones (Darley and Latané, 1968). Thus, providing those
bystanders with more information is an important mechanism to convert bystanders to
backers.
We expect that the funding project duration may influence the degree of ambiguity
and thus reduce the bystander effect on crowdfunding platforms. On the flyingV plat-

form, notification letters are sent to the supporters once they press the “Like” button on
the project webpage. When project supporters receive notification letters from the flyingV
platform, they are aware of the progress of the project, including such details as the num-

ber of remaining funding days and the accumulated number of pledges. At the same time,
project creators will continue to post project updates and answer project-related questions
to all supporters (Block, Hornuf, and Moritz, 2018), and this will significantly reduce in-
formation asymmetry between project creators and bystanders (Mollick, 2014). Therefore,
the longer the project funding duration, the more likely that the bystanders have opportu-

nities to gather and evaluate project-related information. The reduced project ambiguity
is, therefore, more likely to convert bystanders to backers. We propose the following
hypothesis:

Hypothesis 3: Project funding duration weakens the negative relationship between
the bystander ratio of a project and the project pledge amount.

Thus far, we propose three hypotheses, and Figure 1 illustrates our research
framework.

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