“Fund me, I am fabulous!” Do narcissistic entrepreneurs succeed or fail in crowdfunding?

Highlights

• Does narcissism influence entrepreneur's resource acquisition through crowdfunding?

• We analyze data from 59,538 crowdfunding campaigns on Kickstarter.

• We measure entrepreneur's narcissism by means of the first-person pronoun usage.

• Entrepreneur's narcissism negatively relates to crowdfunding success.

• Results are contingent to the entrepreneurial context in which the campaign is set.

Abstract

In this paper, we extend the nascent literature interested in understanding the role of narcissism in determining resource acquisition by entrepreneurs. Using a sample of 59,538 crowdfunding campaigns launched by individual entrepreneurs on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter and adopting an unobtrusive measure of narcissism derived from the literature, we demonstrate that a negative relation exists between narcissism and crowdfunding success: the greater the entrepreneur's narcissistic personality, the lower the probability s/he succeeds in funding her/his crowdfunding campaign. Nevertheless, this relation changes depending on the entrepreneurial context in which the entrepreneur sets her/his crowdfunding campaign.

Introduction

In the literature on how personality affects entrepreneurship, it is generally well accepted that narcissism, which refers to some combination of grandiosity, vanity, self-absorption, feelings of entitlement, and willingness to exploit others (e.g., Bradlee & Emmons, 1992; Krizan & Herlache, 2018; Manley, Paisarnsrisomsuk, & Roberts, 2020), influences entrepreneurs' behavior and performances (e.g., Chatterjee & Hambrick, 2007; Miller, 2015; Navis & Ozbek, 2016). Prior research in this field has suggested, for instance, that narcissism explains entrepreneurs' choices to operate in more novel and riskier venture contexts (Navis & Ozbek, 2016). Moreover, it has been shown that, in entrepreneurial teams, greater narcissism is associated to better business planning performances (Kollmann, Stöckmann, & Linstaedt, 2019), while it can create cognitive and motivational obstacles to entrepreneurial learning from failure (Liu, Li, Hao, & Zhang, 2019). Narcissism has been linked also to entrepreneurs' resource acquisition (Gombola & Marciukaityte, 2007), although, as a matter of fact, our understanding on how narcissistic entrepreneurs acquire resources is comparatively more limited (Navis & Ozbek, 2016).

The raise of crowdfunding provides an ideal empirical setting to contribute to this debate. Prior literature on crowdfunding has broadly shown that the entrepreneur's personality plays a key role in resource acquisition (e.g., Bernardino & Santos, 2016; McKenny, Allison, Ketchen Jr, Short, & Ireland, 2017; Obschonka & Stuetzer, 2017) given her/his direct relation with the crowd of (potential) backers. Prior studies have also provided initial support for the existence of a relation between narcissism and resource acquisition through crowdfunding (Anglin, Wolfe, Short, McKenny, & Pidduck, 2018; Bollaert, Leboeuf, & Schwienbacher, 2019). Yet, their findings are mixed and focus on a limited number of contingency factors – i.e., sex, sexual orientation, and race – while neglecting other contingencies that may come into play affecting this relation. The current study takes a step in this direction exploring the relation between narcissism and resource acquisition in crowdfunding through a large-scale quantitative analysis. Moreover, it introduces a new contingency factor that has been so fa neglected by the literature, i.e., the entrepreneurial context. Indeed, the potential backers might differently value (positively or negatively) the narcissistic personality depending on the entrepreneurial context in which the entrepreneur decides to operate with her/his venture.

Our results thus shed new light on the consequences of having a narcissistic personality for entrepreneurs launching a crowdfunding campaign. Below we review the literature on narcissism and on crowdfunding, with a focus on the determinants of success. Then, we present our methodology and results. The concluding section discusses results and limitations, and offers some future research directions.