The role of entrepreneurs’ discourse in the success of crowdlending campaigns

This article studies the effect of the discourse used by entrepreneurs on the success of the lending campaigns. Based on data collected from three main lending platforms in France, we first identified three classes of discourse using automated textual analysis: a discourse related to the company’s financial situation, a discourse related to the management team and a discourse related to the product. Secondly, we studied the impact of these three classes of discourse on fundraising success using the penalized maximum likelihood methodology. The results reveal that only the discourse related to the company’s financial situation has a positive and significant effect on the success of the campaign.
JEL Codes: L14, L26, G23