Abstract:

The success of the crowdfunding projects financing is influenced by the social capital of sponsors, but few papers focus on the influence of the network structure, which can help a better understanding of the power of users, the interaction among them and the dynamic mechanism of the diffusion of the support behavior. This paper uses the social network analysis method, which utilizes the projects of the website “www.zhongchou.com” as samples and extracts supporting relationship to construct relationship matrixes and analyze the characteristics of the corwdfunding network structure, then gets it visualized by Gephi. The research finds that the density of the network structure is low ,and the user with high frequency of supporting behaviors occupies the center of the network and plays an important role as a broker. The number of supporters and financing are also significantly affected by the network structure characteristics of the sponsors. Finally this study put forwards that the platform should pay attention to the active users, make the reciprocity norms explicitly, construct users community, etc. This paper deepens the study of social capital in crowdfunding and provides a reference for platforms and sponsors.

Key words: Crowdfunding, Social network analysis, Network structure, User relationship