Start-ups often face the challenge of a shortage of capital, the so-called funding gap, which can be overcome by raising small amounts of money from a large number of individuals. As crowdfunding suffers from a continuous rise in failure rates, the aim of this article is to contribute to the research concerning success factors in reward-based crowdfunding campaigns by focusing on signaling theory. Based on data retrieved from the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, our results indicate that social ties, investment preparation and presentation, the supply of multiple rewards as well as endeavors to communicate and interact with the crowd positively influence the probability of success of a reward-based crowdfunding campaign. In contrast, the funding goal, a campaign's runtime and the estimated time of delivery for the rewards have a negative impact on the successful completion of a campaign.

The research presented in this paper was partially funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research in the context of the project KoLeArn (www.KoLeArn.de), Grant No. 01BE17008A. The authors are responsible for the content of this publication. We express our gratitude to the students of the University of Kassel who took part in this study. We would also like to thank Marian Thiel de Gafenco for his work and ideas in the early phases of this research project. Furthermore, this research builds on a paper that has been presented at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting 2017 in Atlanta (Janson & Söllner, 2017). We thank the reviewers and attendees as well as the mentors of the Management Education and Learning Writers Workshop for their valuable feedback that helped us to improve our research and to write this paper. Last but not least, we thank the Associate Editor for his guidance as well as the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback and openness during the review process.

To profit from crowdsourcing, organizations can engage in four different approaches: microtasking, information pooling, broadcast search, and open collaboration. In this paper, we present 21 governance mechanisms that can help organizations manage their crowdsourcing platforms. We investigate the effectiveness of these governance mechanisms in 19 case studies and recommend specific configurations of these mechanisms for each of the four crowdsourcing approaches. Also, we provide guidance to organizations that host a crowdsourcing platform by providing recommendations for implementing governance mechanisms into their platforms and building up governance capabilities for crowdsourcing.