Beyond the Opposition Between Altruism and Self-interest: Reciprocal Giving in Reward-Based Crowdfunding

Journal of Business Ethics 146 (2):313-332 (2017)
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Abstract

Increasingly, frontiers between business and philanthropy seem to be blurred. Reward-Based Crowdfunding platforms contribute to this blurring of lines since they propose funders to support both for-profit and philanthropic projects. Our empirical paper explores the case of Ulule, the leading crowdfunding platform in Europe. Our results, based on a statistical analysis of more than 3000 projects, show that crowdfunding platforms foster specific kinds of relationships relying on reciprocal giving, beyond the usual opposition between altruistic and selfish motivations. We use the work of Marcel Mauss to account for this process of reciprocal giving, and we argue that Maussian theory of gift can be used more generally to describe funding activities in the context of early stage entrepreneurship.

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References found in this work

The possibility of altruism.Thomas Nagel - 1970 - Oxford,: Clarendon P..
Of grammatology.Jacques Derrida - 1998 - Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Edited by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
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The Politics of Stakeholder Theory.R. Edward Freeman - 1994 - Business Ethics Quarterly 4 (4):409-421.

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