Tell me about yourself and I might recommend you: a motivation-based explanation of crowdlending investors’ customer citizenship behavior☆

Abstract

Competition among entrepreneurial funding platforms has made it more important than ever to attract and retain investors to ensure the sustainability of entrepreneurial ecosystems. In this context, investor recommendations are a key mechanism to generate trust in crowdlending platforms. This paper investigates the existence of necessary and sufficient conditions that explain investor recommendations of crowdlending platforms and explores how the motivations behind investor behavior are linked to investor recommendations of these platforms. Necessary condition analysis (NCA) and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) were performed using data on 83 investors. Of the intrinsic/self-oriented motivations considered in the analysis, only satisfaction emerged as an individual in-degree necessary condition from the NCA. The analysis also confirmed the synergistic effects of intrinsic/self-oriented and extrinsic/other-oriented motivations as sufficient conditions for explaining investor behavior. Nonetheless, such behavior can still be explained exclusively by intrinsic/self-oriented conditions. The study enriches the knowledge of how investor motivations explain the sustainability of platforms that provide alternative forms of financing for entrepreneurs.