How heuristic cues impact crowdfunding performance: The moderating role of platform competition intensity and platform demand potential

Crowdfunding is an emerging financial channel for entrepreneurs to finance ventures. Nevertheless, the funding success rates of reward-based crowdfunding projects are low, apparently due to information asymmetries between entrepreneurs and potential investors. Using heuristic cues to improve crowdfunding performance has attracted increasing attention from both scholars and practitioners. To expand understanding of the role of heuristic cues in crowdfunding, the current study explores how platform contextual factors leverage the effect of heuristic cues on crowdfunding performance. This study analyzed 6363 projects on the Jingdong crowdfunding platform and found that the performance benefits of heuristic cues were substantially contingent on platform competition intensity and platform demand potential. The results provide empirical evidence that platform competition intensity can weaken the heuristics-performance relationship, while platform demand potential can strengthen it. These findings extend current conceptions of the relationship between signals and performance in signaling theory and the crowdfunding literature.