Psychological ownership and disownership in reward-based crowdfunding

Abstract

Crowdfunding backers can develop psychological connections with reward-based crowdfunded ventures and provide product development feedback, brand evangelism, and legitimacy, before, during, and after crowdfunding campaigns. Yet how backers form psychological connections to ventures and how these connections change over time remains understudied. Through netnographic inquiry of 3,759 comments from 828 backers on the Oculus Kickstarter forum and interviews with 19 backers, this paper shows how backers come to feel a sense of psychological ownership through investment of self, feelings of efficacy, and intimate knowing. The paper then advances this line of inquiry by theoretically and empirically developing psychological disownership, which entails backers disavowing a once psychologically owned target in response to a perceived violation. Psychological disownership manifests through breach of trust, disillusionment, loss of identity, and loss of efficacy. Finally, the paper offers several avenues for future research on backer-venture relationships in crowdfunding and actionable insights for crowdfunding project creators.