Antecedents of Medical Crowdfunding Information Sharing Behaviors on Social Media: an empirical study (Preprint)

Abstract

The extensive use of social media enables crowdfunding information to spread to a wider extent. Therefore, understanding people’s psychological motivation to help others becomes a critical issue.

We focus on the sharing behaviors of medical crowdfunding initiations on social media and aims to investigate the psychological motivational factors contribute to people’s sharing behaviors.

Based on the theory of interpersonal behavior, a model was developed to examine the factors that influence people’s intention and actual sharing behaviors of medical crowdfunding on social media. The model was tested empirically using lagged data from 363 Chinese participants.

The results show that altruism (β = 0.11, p < .05), warm glow (β = 0.45, p < .001), relationship orientation (β = 0.12, p < .05), and perceived information credibility (β = 0.21, p < .001) are antecedents of intention to share of medical crowdfunding information. Inter-dependency between altruism and warm glow such that altruism is positively related to warm glow (β = 0.59, p < .001). Intention to share information (β = 0.59, p < .001), habit (β = 0.29, p < .001), and facilitating conditions (β = 0.15, p < .01) positively impact actual sharing behaviors of medical crowdfunding information. Our results also reveal no moderating effects of facilitating conditions (β = 0.08, p > .05) and habits (β = -0.03, p > .05) in the relationship between crowdfunding information sharing intention and actual sharing behavior.

This study develops a theoretical model that explains people's intention to share crowdfunding information. Findings have theoretical values for researchers as well as practical values for medical crowdfunding initiator and the platform designer.