Time is money: The role of explicit and implicit timelines on crowdfunding performance

Abstract

The performance of crowdfunding campaigns is closely related to timelines, which are divided into explicit and implicit ones. The explicit timelines refer to the temporal information aiming at specific actions, while the implicit timelines focus on the temporal cues involved in the linguistic descriptions of non-specific actions. Drawing on intertemporal choice theory, we assess how explicit and implicit timelines affect potential backers’ decisions by triggering temporal discounting and leading to the discounting bias. We examine how these timelines affect crowdfunding performance in reward-based crowdfunding and conduct our analysis on a sample of 18,659 campaigns in the technology category on Kickstarter from 2009 to 2018. We find that potential backers facing prolonged reward intervals are reluctant to pledge. Longer crowdfunding duration and a larger time horizon length can weaken this negative impact, while more temporal information intensifies the effect. These findings provide new insights into crowdfunding literature, timeline research, and crowdfunding practices.