소비자에서 투자자로 －크라우드 펀딩 참여에 영향을 미치는 개인의 심리적 요인에 관한 탐색적 연구－

Crowd funding, the practice of consumers’ proactive participation via the Internet, has gained significance as the role of consumers has expanded from mere consumption of products and services to active intervention in the production and investment process. This study aims to investigate the changes in consumers’ roles with the introduction of crowd funding by examining the factors that have led them to participate in crowd funding. Three experiments were conducted to investigate the key factors affecting their participation in crowd funding. The first experiment used the construal level theory to examine the influence of the psychological distance perceived by consumers on their participation in crowd funding. The second experiment examined the influence of the perceived fairness of rewards on participation in crowd funding. The third experiment attempted to determine the factors that had influenced consumers’ agreement based on their social influence, and the second. The study’s findings show that the perceived fairness of rewards has the greatest influence in leading consumers to participate in crowd funding. This study is significant because it proposes an elaborate and delicate theoretical framework towards the future study on crowd funding–related fields, and demonstrates the need to develop an information format that can further enhance consumers’ fairness perception in devising a crowd-funding project.