"The digital context of equity crowdfunding broadens and diversifies the pool of potential investors and is thus touted as a means to democratize access to capital for non-traditional innovators. It is unclear whether such democratization also applies to user entrepreneurs. User innovators are consumers who create products with the goal of serving their own unmet needs; if they subsequently pursue entrepreneurship as a means to commercialize their innovations they become user entrepreneurs. Importantly, user innovators are significant contributors to consumer product innovation. In contrast, traditional entrepreneurs, also called producer entrepreneurs, create products with the goal of profiting from them. We examine whether investors in equity crowdfunding respond differently to user entrepreneurs relative to traditional producer entrepreneurs, and explore heterogeneity in investor responses. Through a randomized field experiment, we find that less experienced investors are more receptive to user innovators than investors with more experience. Experienced investors are significantly less interested in ventures by user innovators, relative to those by producer innovators, likely due to experienced investors' concern about the ability of user entrepreneurs to commercialize their ideas. Consequently, the democratization of access to capital for user entrepreneurs comes from less experienced investors who are often inaccessible in traditional investment settings."

"We seek to examine founder gender preferences in the context of equity crowdfunding, which represents a direct counterpart to traditional equity financing and which is a "higher-stakes" context than rewards-based crowdfunding. More specifically, we explore whether founder gender preferences, if they exist, vary based on the gender and the experience of the investor. Through a randomized field experiment, we find that inexperienced female investors are significantly more interested (138%) in ventures with female founders than those with male founders; however, we do not observe founder gender preferences among experienced female investors. For male investors, we do not observe differences in interest in investing based on founder gender or investor experience. We thus confirm that the gender gaps observed in traditional equity funding do not apply to equity crowdfunding. Further, we theorize that the mechanisms proposed in previous research in low-stakes crowdfunding decision contexts, such as the use of founder gender as a heuristic and participation in activism homophily, that drive female investors to prefer female founders may not apply to experienced investors in higher-stakes equity crowdfunding. The results from a follow-up survey of the study participants provide support for our theoretical arguments."