ABSTRACT
Humans are neither the fastest nor the largest species on this planet. We are remarkable because of our ability to cooperate to reach common purposes. A textbook example of such cooperation is the modern version of crowdfunding, which leverages the collaboration between entrepreneurs and investors using the Internet. As defined in Chapter 12 in this volume, the term “crowdfunding” represents an umbrella expression that is used to identify an increasingly growing form of fundraising, typically via the Internet, where groups of people, as both individuals and legal entities, contribute to support a particular goal (Ahlers et al., 2015). As our technological development has progressed, we have been able to communicate with each other over growing geographical distances – first in the form of letters, then landline phones, mobile phones, and recently, the Internet. The technological aspect of how we facilitate communication might have changed over time, but trust, as a glue of any cooperation, has remained relatively unaffected.
