Equity crowdfunding platforms are at the center of the digital transformation of early-stage venture funding. These digital platforms were originally heralded as a democratizing force in early stage finance, due to their role in facilitating the exchange between entrepreneurs and a multitude of non-professional small investors ("the crowd"). Equity crowdfunding platforms have experienced considerable growth and now attract professional investors including business angels. The presence of angels alongside the crowd on equity crowdfunding platforms has raised questions whether these digital platforms can continue to play their role in democratizing access to capital. Using data from a leading equity crowdfunding platform, we examine the interplay between the investment decisions of angels and the crowd. We find evidence of information flows in crowdfunding platforms between angels, and from angels to the crowd. We find angels play an important role in funding of large ventures, whereas the crowd not only fill the funding gaps for such large ventures but also play a pivotal role in the funding of small ones. The complementarity between angels and crowd investors seems to increase the overall efficiency in an otherwise highly asymmetric and uncertain market, confirming that digitization can indeed bring important benefits to venture investment.

Visual cues are pervasive on crowdfunding platforms. However, whether and how low validity visual cues can impact the behavior of backers remains largely unknown. In this article, we propose a disfluency-based heuristic framework for understanding the influence of low validity visual cues on equity crowdfunding platforms. Drawing on processing fluency theory and visual heuristics, we propose that backers often automatically process visual cues, and that the subjective experience of ease/difficulty with which backers perceptually process low validity visual cues serves as a heuristic and informs their perceptions of early-stage entrepreneurial ventures. We test our propositions focusing on logos (low validity visual cues that are particularly salient and ubiquitous on equity crowdfunding platforms) and logo complexity (a fundamental characteristic of logo design and established antecedent of processing disfluency). We contend that logo complexity can be interpreted by backers as a signal of venture innovativeness because more (vs. less) complex logos are more difficult to process, and thus, feel less familiar and more unique, original, and novel to backers. Since backers often value innovativeness, we further contend that logo complexity can positively impact backers' funding decisions. We find support for our framework and propositions using a multimethod approach comprising three studies: one survey, one field study, and one experiment. Theoretical contributions and managerial implications are also discussed.

Logos frequently include textual and/or visual design elements that are descriptive of the type of product/service that brands market. However, knowledge about how and when logo descriptiveness can influence brand equity is limited. Using a multimethod research approach across six studies, the authors demonstrate that more (vs. less) descriptive logos can positively influence brand evaluations, purchase intentions, and brand performance. They also demonstrate that these effects occur because more (vs. less) descriptive logos are easier to process and thus elicit stronger impressions of authenticity, which consumers value. Furthermore, two important moderators are identified: the positive effects of logo descriptiveness are considerably attenuated for brands that are familiar (vs. unfamiliar) to consumers and reversed (i.e., negative) for brands that market a type of product/service linked with negatively (vs. positively) valenced associations in consumers’ minds. Finally, an analysis of 597 brand logos suggests that marketing practitioners might not fully take advantage of the potential benefits of logo descriptiveness. The theoretical contributions and managerial implications of these findings are discussed.

Using hourly traffic and readership data from a major news website, and taking advantage of a global Facebook outage, we study the relationship between social networks and online news consumption. More specifically, we test if online social networks compete with content providers or instead play a complementary role by promoting and attracting traffic to external websites. During the outage, consistent with a promotional effect, we observe a significant decrease in traffic and unique visitors to the news website lasting beyond the outage hours. We further find that direct referrals from Facebook links, grossly underestimated the actual impact of Facebook in generating traffic. Instead, during the outage, we observe a more significant reduction in visitors arriving at the news website from search engines or directly typing the website URL or using bookmarks. Additionally, readership of articles and types of pages viewed also changed during the outage. Although we observe a drop in news consumption during the outage hours for all news categories, the subsequent news consumption differs across categories. Time sensitive categories like Sports and Local News see an increase in consumption whereas news on Women Issues or Health topics see a decrease. Analysis of individual-level visit and readership behavior during the outage also reveals that Facebook not only introduces selectivity bias by attracting shallower readers, Facebook also changes readership patterns (in the absence of Facebook, visitors engage in more in-depth reading). To test the generalizability of our results we study the impact of the outage on referrals from other social media outlets, on other news sites, and on other content and e-commerce sites. We find similar effects on other news providers whereas data from non-news sites, including e-commerce, show no major outage effects. Overall, our results have important managerial implications. We highlight how our results unearth the importance of search engine optimization and of strong branding for news websites, if providers want to harness fully the power of their social media presence.

This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. This study explores the role of online engagement, homophily and social influence in explaining traffic and news consumption by social network users at an external news website. The authors jointly model visits and page views for a panel of users who registered with the news site using their Facebook accounts. In their model, the authors account for homophily using a latent space approach, and account for endogeneity, heterogeneity, and unobservable correlates. The results show that measures of an individual's activity on Facebook are positively associated with that individual's actions at the news site. In addition, knowing what a user's Facebook friends do at the content website provides insights into a focal user's behavior at that website, as visitors with friends who visit external news sites are more likely to visit the news website studied. In addition, news consumption (not just visits) also depends on friend's actions but such an impact varies with the individual's underlying browsing mode. We highlight the importance of social influence in news consumption and further show that homophily bias in news consumption is similar to prior research in other categories. Our study also highlights that visitors' past browsing patterns are important predictors of future content consumption, although social network information significantly improves prediction beyond the effect of such more traditional behavioral metrics. Finally, we find that Managers can use readily available data for both prediction and targeting. Permanent repository link