Words Speak Londer than Action? The Role of Speech Act of Linguistic Differentiation on Philanthropic Crowdfunding Platform

Past research focused on the text characteristics such as the length and emotion of the project description, however, they ignore the dynamic competition from homogeneous projects on the platform. Following the prevalent linguistic style in the platform or maintaining a personal style are two common ways to design project descriptions. We apply the contestable market and speech act theory to construct our theoretical framework. The empirical results show that linguistic differentiation has a significant negative effect on crowdfunding success, indicating that people should stick to the prevalent linguistic style on the platform. In specific, assertive speech act and expressive speech act have a positive impact while directive speech act has a negative impact on the project success. We have other similar interesting findings about the effect of speech acts on student performance, which provides effective strategies for launching a successful crowdfunding campaign in a competitive crowdfunding platform.