The Effects of Assurance and Construal Levels on Investment Decisions in Equity Crowdfunding

ABSTRACT Voluntary assurance represents a costly signal of financial reporting quality in equity crowdfunding markets, yet investors often fail to distinguish audit from review reports. Drawing on signaling theory and construal-level theory, I argue that this reflects a fundamental cognitive processing problem: financial statement users default to a high-level construal mindset, focusing on abstract conclusions over engagement-level details. I posit that platform-embedded priming instructions prompting users to consider how the report’s conclusion was reached can solve this problem by inducing a low-level construal mindset, redirecting attention toward concrete details that carry the signal. In an experiment with 121 participants, only when primed did investors with an audit report show greater reliance and investment willingness than those with a review report. Perceived credibility also mediated this effect. These findings suggest that assurance signal effectiveness depends not only on disclosure content but on how information is cognitively framed through platform design.