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The More, the Merrier? The Bystander Effect on Crowdfunding Platforms

Several limitations may constrain the generalizability of our findings. First, we used
a Taiwan-based crowdfunding platform, flyingV, as our sample of analysis. Compared to
Kickstarter in the U.S., the biggest crowdfunding platform globally, the scale of flyingV
is relatively small, leading to the concern about the generalization of our case. However,

from the social psychological perspective, the behaviors of investors should be similar
all around the world regardless of the size of the platform (Fischer et al., 2011). Thus,
our research provides an initial attempt that allows future researchers to explore related

research questions on other crowdfunding platforms.
Second, in line with the definitions in Darley and Latané (1968), we define bystanders
as those who pay attention to the project but who do not pledge (i.e., do not offer help).
On the crowdfunding platform, those supporters might become bystanders for different
reasons; for example, they might forget to “unclick” the “Like” button on the project

webpage after their initial project evaluation. Indeed, due to data limitations, we do not
know why those bystanders do not pledge. However, the bystander literature primarily
focuses on how the presence of bystanders influences non-helping behavior (Darley and

Latané, 1968; Fischer et al., 2011), without explicitly considering the motivation for being
bystanders. While examining the motivations for being bystanders and its implications
for fundraising performance is an interesting research question, it is beyond the scope of
our study. We encourage future researchers to investigate how various reasons for being
bystanders would influence subsequent non-helping behavior.

Third, we used incumbent-firm projects as a proxy for project legitimacy. Future
studies are encouraged to explore other forms of legitimacy on crowdfunding platforms,
such as affiliation with reputable organizations (Rao, 1994; Sorescu et al., 2007), entre-

preneurs’ narratives (Frydrych, Bock, Kinder, and Koeck, 2014; Lin and Siao, 2012), and
founders’ social networks (Hsieh and Fang, 2020). We hope that our study will stimulate
more researchers to delve more deeply into the role of legitimacy on crowdfunding plat-
forms.
Lastly, similar to prior studies (Chan et al., 2020; Kuppuswamy and Bayus, 2017),

we examine the daily funding dynamics based on a sample of crowdfunding projects.
However, it may be of value to gather more information about the decision-making process
of individual investors through survey questions or face-to-face interviews. Despite these

limitations, our findings provide robust evidence on the existence of the bystander effect

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