The Influence of Product Maturity and Innovativeness on Consumers‘ Perceived Uncertainty in Reward-Based Crowdfunding

Reward-based crowdfunding (CF) has become a meaningful alternative to facilitate the realization process of new product ideas. While prior research has primarily investigated antecedents of campaign success on the project level, research from a consumer’s perspective is scarce. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to make a first step in this direction by introducing the theoretical lens of consumer behavior research to the growing CF literature. On the basis of the combined results of field data and a controlled experiment we demonstrate that perceived uncertainty plays a fundamental role with regard to consumers’ willingness to pre-purchase products via CF. Our results show that a proposed product’s level of maturity as well as its degree of innovativeness affect consumers’ perceived uncertainty, but have different effects on consumers’ willingness to support a reward-based CF campaign. These findings have implications for researchers and project founders.