Did You Invest Less Than Me? The Effect of Other’s Share of Investment on Psychological Ownership of Crowdfunding Projects

Abstract

The development of information technology, in an online context, has expanded into collective consumption, e.g., crowdfunding projects. Moreover, people feel a sense of psychological ownership (“it is mine”) toward projects they invest in, even if their attributes are immaterial or intangible. This research focuses on changes in psychological ownership based on the characteristics of crowdfunding projects, which are collectively invested in with others, and the attributes of objects (tangible/intangible). Specifically, this research seeks to determine how psychological ownership is affected by information about the amount of money invested by others in a shared project. Additionally, this research investigates whether psychological ownership changes based on others’ investment (less/more) and the attributes (tangible/intangible) of the project. The findings from the empirical analysis indicate that psychological ownership changes based on information regarding other people’s investment in a shared crowdfunding project. The results also show that, in projects with tangible attributes, psychological ownership changes based on investment information; however, no changes were observed in projects with intangible attributes.

The Effective Type of Information Categorization in Online Curation Service Depending on Psychological Ownership

“…Recently, psychological ownership has been highlighted in various fields such as marketing, business, psychology, and consumer research [25,32,43,44]. In particular, research on psychological ownership of online services or intangible content is actively being conducted [26,29,[35][36][37]45]. This study also paced this trend, once again, confirming that consumers feel psychological ownership of online services that are intangible, while empirically verifying that psychological ownership affects their attitudes through experiments.…”

“…As a consequence of psychological ownership, many studies in various fields such as marketing, business, psychology, and consumer research suggest that the feelings of ownership toward a target are positively related to the motivational, attitudinal, and behavioral effects [21,23,[28][29][30][31][32][33][34]. Moreover, recent studies on the role of psychological ownership affecting consumer attitudes in the online context have emerged, focusing on significant consequences such as citizen behavior, continuance usage, willingness to pay more, security behavior, satisfaction, and intention to switch [26,27,[35][36][37].…”

UGC Sharing Motives and Their Effects on UGC Sharing Intention from Quantitative and Qualitative Perspectives: Focusing on Content Creators in South Korea

“…The first is the expansion dimension of the variable. This study does not take into account individual propensity or ability, and if this part such as construal level [55], psychological ownership [56][57][58], knowledge level [59] or consumer profile [60] is added, much more sophisticated insights can be derived. The second is the diversification dimension of the methodology.…”

Consumer Adoption of Consumer-Created vs. Expert-Created Information: Moderating Role of Prior Product Attitude

“…Consumer side characteristics, such as motivation and knowledge, may have control-moderating effects on ECI and CCI. For example, it is necessary to consider regulatory focus and construal level, which are informational variables that consumers continuously process and are currently being studied by scholars [35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45]. Additionally, depending on product characteristics (tangible vs. intangible, actual vs. virtual), the effects of ECI and CCI can be different [40][41][42].…”