Crowdfunding User Acceptance: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Despite the popularity of crowdfunding throughout the world, there is a limited amount of academic research conducted to study user acceptance. This review aims to reflect the current state of crowdfunding research, especially related to its user acceptance. To achieve the objective, the study searched and reviewed current empirical knowledge on crowdfunding user acceptance in the Scopus and Web of Science databases from 2015-2023. An organized methodology for conducting a literature review was used throughout the entire process. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) article selection flowchart stages were utilized to implement the article selection criteria. The study found 137 articles in the identification stage from Scopus and Web of Science databases out of which 107 articles were screened and found 68 articles for testing eligibility and 41 articles for analysis. 96 articles were removed from the analysis in total. The study adopted Keyword co-occurrence analysis as one of the bibliometric analyses performed with VOS viewer. The findings reveal that crowdfunding user acceptance research can be mainly categorized under the themes of “crowdfunding user acceptance through technology acceptance”, “behavioral aspect of crowdfunding users” and “external factors influencing user acceptance”. Each of these clusters indicates different approaches to studying crowdfunding user acceptance. Further studies can be focused on finding different combined approaches to study crowdfunding user acceptance with different theories.