Page 143 - 臺大管理論叢第32卷第2期

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

3.2.3 Moderator
Our study includes two moderating variables. The attributes of project creators may
also affect the daily amount of fundraising. We coded project legitimacy as 1 if a project is
initiated by an incumbent private or public organization and as 0 if it is initiated by a non-

incumbent firm.
This second moderating variable is project duration. This variable represents the
number of fundraising days for which a project is open to accept donations from backers

on the platform. The flyingV platform allows projects to raise funds for as many as 90
days, but most projects set their duration from 30 to 60 days. We take the logarithm value
of this variable to reduce its skewness (Courtney et al., 2017).

3.2.4 Control Variables

We control for the following factors that may affect the daily pledge amount. First,
considering the impact of prior funding, we calculate the cumulative amount of money that
has been pledged into this project from the beginning of the campaign to the previous day

(Chan et al., 2020). Cumulative pledge amount is the ratio of cumulative pledge amount to
the funding goal in our empirical analysis.
We also control for perceived project quality. We use the project creators’ past cam-
paign experiences on the flyingV platform as a proxy. Project creators with better past per-
formance are expected to launch projects of better quality (Usman et al., 2019). Moreover,

such experiences represent a certain guarantee for delivering the products or services after
the campaign ends (Courtney et al., 2017). We manually gathered information from the
project creators’ profiles on the flyingV platform. Specifically, we exclude those projects

whose starting date is before December 22, 2014, and the ending date is after March 11,
2015. We only include those projects that are completed before the start date of the focal
project. Perceived project quality is computed as the ratio of the number of previous suc-
cessful projects completed by the project creator to the total number of projects launched
by this project creator on the flyingV platform. A project is considered successful if the

project reaches its funding goal by the end of the crowdfunding campaign.
To control for unobservable category-specific heterogeneity, we also add category
fixed effects in our empirical analysis. flyingV categorized projects into nine categories

in our data collection period, including product design (C1), music and film (C2), art and

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