Narcissism, Machiavellianism and Psychopathy: How Do Displayed Entrepreneurs’ Personality Dark Traits Influence Crowdfunding Success?

Million dollar personality: a systematic literature review on personality in crowdfunding

“…Although the articles report no significant results for Machiavellianism, they report some evidence for the effects of psychopathy. For example, Creek ( 2018 ) finds a positive relationship between the amount raised and psychopathy in equity-based crowdfunding, contrary to the opposite finding of Leonelli et al ( 2020 ) regarding campaign success.…”

“…Our search returned papers focusing on the following personality constructs in line with our search terms: the Big Five in general (Bernardino and Santos 2016 ; Davidson and Poor 2015 ; Gera and Kaur 2018 ; Kim and Hall 2021 ; Kim et al 2021 ; Rottler et al 2020 ; Ryu and Kim 2016 ; Thies et al 2016 ), only openness (Moritz et al 2015 ), only conscientiousness (Moss et al 2015 ; Short and Anglin 2019 ), only extraversion (Netzer et al 2019 ) the Dark Triad (Creek 2018 ; Leonelli et al 2020 ), only narcissism (Anglin et al 2018b ; Bollaert et al 2019 ; Butticé and Rovelli 2020 ), self-efficacy (Harburg et al 2015 ; Macht and Chapman 2019 ; Shneor and Munim 2019 ; Stevenson et al 2019 ; Troise and Tani 2020 ), innovativeness (Calic and Shevchenko 2020 ; Moss et al 2015 ; Rodriguez-Ricardo et al 2018 ; Shin and Lee 2020 ; Short and Anglin 2019 ; Tseng 2020 ), and locus of control (Rodriguez-Ricardo et al 2018 ). Also, the broad search for the term “personality” in general also revealed additional traits investigated by researchers in the context of crowdfunding: risk-taking (Calic and Shevchenko 2020 ; Moss et al 2015 ; Short and Anglin 2019 ), autonomy (Moss et al 2015 ; Short and Anglin 2019 ), as well as charisma and hubris (Sundermeier and Kummer 2019 ).…”

“…This point was made by eight articles included in this research (Fig. 5 ; e.g., Bollaert et al 2019 ; Leonelli et al 2020 ) Second, even when the type of crowdfunding and platform are held constant, such replication studies are crucial to generate a reliable knowledge base about the relationships between personality constructs and crowdfunding outcomes. Third, as cultural and geographic factors could also influence crowdfunding outcomes, authors should consider including different regions in their studies as suggested by Bernardino and Santos ( 2016 ) and others (Table 5 ).…”

“…Trying to summarize the relationships tested by the quantitative studies on personality and crowdfunding campaign success does not result in a clear picture (see Table 4 ). Instead, many studies find no effects, where others find effects or even contradictory results (e.g., Creek 2018 ; Leonelli et al 2020 ).…”

“…Third, as future research opportunities are of particular interest to the scientific community, we then continued to cluster the mentioned research opportunities into categories. Therefore, two authors independently categorized the future research opportunities mentioned by the respective authors of the reviewed papers, clustering them by similarity (e.g., “We thus advise scholars to extend our work to alternative types of crowdfunding campaigns and platforms.” (Butticé and Rovelli 2020 , p. 5) and “future research can be extended to other forms of crowdfunding, such as peer-to-peer lending” (Leonelli et al 2020 , p. 55)). Next we compared the clusters and resolved the remaining differences by reaching consensus between the authors (e.g., splitting the topic “perspectives” into the topics “perspective” and “context”).…”