Positive Sentiment and the Donation Amount: Social Norms in Crowdfunding Donations During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Public welfare fundraising has been used to collect donations for medical supplies and has played an important role in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper studies online crowdfunding donations from the Alumni Association of Wuhan University to North American alumni; donation data are used to investigate how individuals' donation behavior is affected by the previous donation amount and information provided by the fundraising platform. First, our results show that one's donation amount is positively affected by the previous donation amount. Second, the donor's positive sentiment in the message that he or she leaves, as measured by either natural language processing or a manual rating, can affect the subsequent anonymity and messages but not the subsequent donation amount. Third, anonymous donations are much smaller than non-anonymous donations.

Signaling effect in social network and charity crowdfunding: Empirical analysis of charity crowdfunding of Sina MicroBlog in China

“…Second, this study expands previous research on charity crowdfunding in terms of social recommendations. We discuss the influencing factors of charity crowdfunding performance from the perspective of social recommendation ( Sura et al, 2017 ; Li et al, 2018 ; Peng et al, 2022 ). Research on traditional charity crowdfunding is mainly based on platform characteristics, fundraising goals, project description, narrative style, and other information.…”

“…Social capital is endogenous because of relational structures in social networks. Resource functions and institutional effects, which are important attributes of social capital, play a vital role in governing modern social organizations and making decisions by donors in the network environment ( Peng et al, 2022 ). Social recommendations reflect user’s approval of a product or service, which is a social resource generated from informal relationships.…”

“…It is essential to consider social recommendations of the crowdfunding project. Peng et al (2022) found that the number of subsequent participants’ donations was influenced by the emotions of text messages on the crowdfunding platform. The contributions of real-name donors are higher than anonymous donors.…”

Public Perception of Online P2P Lending Applications

“…In the parlance of the knowledge-based approach, also known as the lexicon or rulebased approach, various studies have used the Valence Aware Dictionary and Sentiment Reasoner (VADER) to provide sentiment intensity scores [1,2,14,43,44]. Others have used alternative lexicon-based techniques, such as the ontology Library of Chinese Emotional Vocabulary [31], Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) and WordNet software packages [11,34], snowNLP [43], SentiWordNet [38], TextBlob [42], LSTM (long short-term memory) [44], bidirectional long-term, short-term memory (BiLSMT) [45], and DomainSen-ticNet, which is a hybrid aspect-based sentiment analysis system [46].…”

“…Various studies have deployed text analysis methods for feature extraction, such as BOW, the Rake algorithm, Word2Vec, TFIDF, and hashing [26,47]. However, researchers commonly use TF-IDF [2,3,40,43].…”