融资者回复对众筹项目融资绩效的影响:符号的调节作用

Impact of Response on Crowdfunding’s Financing Per-formance:Moderating Effect of Symbols

众筹融资者对在线评论的回复同时使用了符号和文字,二者共同决定投资者决策。本文专注于符号和文本情感对众筹项目融资绩效的影响及符号的调节作用,以解释水平理论中的心理距离为理论基础,从心理层面阐述融资者回复的说服效应。采用爬虫抓取摩点众筹网站的3644个项目及其148833条融资者回复为研究语料,并对数据进行清洗、预处理及语料规范化。采用自然语言处理技术对回复文本和符号进行文本挖掘。以基于语料标注的朴素贝叶斯分类模型进行文本情感标注并量化标点符号(感叹号和问号)与表情符号的使用,构建计量模型、测量文本情感和符号的影响。就回复情感而言,中性情感比非中性情感更有利于缩短心理距离,提高融资绩效;非中性情感中,消极情感在引起共情方面更具优势。就符号内容而言,标点符号对融资绩效具有正面影响,且负向调节回复情感的效用;表情符号则对融资绩效具有消极影响,并在回复情感和融资绩效之间起到正向调节作用。本文证实了标点符号的正面效用及表情符号的负面效用;同时证实了符号对文本情感的调节作用。理论上解释了文本对用户的说服效用,从文本情感和符号使用角度完善了解释水平理论,为文本说服机制和心理距离效应提供了理论解释;实践上为众筹融资者有效回复提供了参考。

Crowdfunding,as an emerging online financing model,provides new funding opportunities for entrepreneurs and small and medium-sized enterprises.However,crowdfunding projects often face low success rates,with many projects failing to meet their expected funding goals.In this context,responses from fundraisers have become a key factor influencing project success.Crowdfunding fundraisers respond to online comments using both symbols and text,both of which jointly determine investors’decisions.This paper focuses on the impact of symbols and text sentiment on the financing performance of crowdfunding projects and explores the moderating role of symbols in this context.Based on the theoretical framework of psychological distance in Construal Level Theory(CLT),this paper elaborates on the persuasive effects of fundraisers’responses from a psychological perspective and constructs a psychological distance model based on the probability of event occurrence as proposed in CLT.Data were collected using web crawlers to scrape 3,644 projects and 148,833 fundraiser responses from the Modian crowdfunding platform.The data were cleaned,preprocessed,and normalized for analysis.Natural language processing(NLP)techniques were used to extract text and symbol features from the responses.Sentiment annotation of the response texts was conducted using a Naive Bayes classification model based on corpus tagging;punctuation marks(exclamation marks and question marks)and emoticons were quantified,and an econometric model was constructed to estimate the effects of text sentiment and symbols.The research results indicate that compared to non-neutral sentiment responses,neutral sentiment responses are more effective in reducing the psychological distance between investors and fundraisers,thereby improving financing performance.Among non-neutral sentiments,negative sentiment is more effective in eliciting empathy.In terms of symbols,punctuation marks positively affect financing performance and negatively moderate the efficacy of response sentiment,while emoticons have a negative impact on financing performance and positively moderate the relationship between response sentiment and financing performance.When examining the detailed effects of punctuation marks,it was found that exclamation marks are the primary reason for the negative moderation of response sentiment on financing performance,while the moderating effect of question marks is not significant.Further robustness tests show that differences in culture,investment returns,and social relationships may lead to varying effectiveness of text and symbols across different crowdfunding platforms.Therefore,future research can further explore the differences in symbol usage across different linguistic backgrounds.Theoretically,this paper applies the concept of psychological distance to the interactive information between fundraisers and investors,suggesting that the psychological distance between fundraisers and investors is one of the factors affecting crowdfunding performance in the crowdfunding domain.This enriches the exploration of psychological distance in text interaction,enhances Construal Level Theory,and provides a theoretical explanation for text persuasion mechanisms and psychological distance effects.Practically,this paper provides specific recommendations for crowdfunding fundraisers on how to effectively respond to online comments.Firstly,fundraisers should focus on expressing neutral sentiments to shorten the psychological distance with investors.This can be achieved by using objective and neutral language,avoiding overly emotional vocabulary.Secondly,moderate use of punctuation marks,such as exclamation points,can enhance the emotional expression of responses and improve financing outcomes.Lastly,the use of emoticons should be carefully considered based on the context and investor preferences to avoid unnecessary negative impacts.In summary,through empirical research,this paper reveals the significant impact of fundraiser responses’sentiment and symbol usage on the financing performance of crowdfunding projects.By applying Construal Level Theory and psychological distance to the crowdfunding domain,this study not only enriches the existing theoretical framework but also provides practical guidance for effective responses in crowdfunding.