Trust Building in Dynamic Process of Internet Entrepreneurial Social Network

Abstract

Nowadays, the emerging Internet technology plays an essential role in pulling entrepreneurs from financial dilemmas and promoting their social capital development. Using the crawling technology, we obtained 2214 entrepreneurial social networks and entrepreneurial project data from Indiegogo.com, which helps to investigate the influence of entrepreneurs' information sharing behavior on entrepreneurial financial outcomes. We discovered that entrepreneurs' trust-building behavior comes with different stages; in personal social network stage, personal-related trust building can boost better financial outcomes, while project-related information sharing can bring about superior financial results in the socialized social network stage. The two relationships reflected above are also affected by the entrepreneurs' online entrepreneurial experience. Taking a dynamic view instead of a static one in entrepreneurial social capital development, this research sets up a paradigm for entrepreneurial events by proposing entrepreneurial information sharing and Internet venture financing model. It also has a strong practical implication for Internet entrepreneurship by offering the two-stage trust-building tactics, which can be further conducive to understanding and applying the information sharing mechanism in the context of e-commerce and sharing economy.

Keywords

• Internet entrepreneurial financing
• social network
• trust building
• Internet crowdfunding
• decision making
• innovation