Intertemporal Consumption in Reward-Based Crowdfunding: The Influence of Psychological Distance on Backers’ Mental Construal of Proposed Products

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 our 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 a controlled experiment we demonstrate that consumers perceive products that are proposed via reward-based CF as psychologically more distal, form more abstract high-level representations of these products and focus more on why-aspects while neglecting the how-aspects of a particular product. These findings have implications for researchers and project founders alike.