Abstract Establishing open innovation communities has evolved as an important product innovation and development strategy for companies. Yet, the success of such communities relies on the successful implementation of many user‐submitted ideas. Although extant literature has examined the impact of user experience and idea characteristics on idea implementation, little is known from the information input perspective, for example, feedback. Based on the information overload theory and knowledge content framework, we propose that the amount and types of feedback content have different effects on the likelihood of subsequent idea implementation, and such effects depend on the level of users' success experience. We tested the research model using a panel logistic model with the data of MIUI Forum. The study results revealed that the amount of feedback has an inverted U‐shaped effect on idea implementation, and such effect is moderated by a user's past success. Moreover, the type of feedback content (cost and benefit‐related feedback and functionality‐related feedback) positively affects idea implementation, and a user's past success positively moderated the above effects. Finally, we discuss the theoretical and practical implications, limitations of our research, and suggestions for future research.

Abstract Project success is critical in the crowdfunding domain. Rather than the existing project‐centric prediction methods, we propose a novel backer‐centric prediction method. We identify each backer's preferences based on their pledge history and calculate the cosine similarity between backer's preferences and the project as each backer's persuasibility. Finally, we aggregate all the backers' persuasibility to predict project success. To validate our method, we crawled data on 183,886 projects launched during or before December 2014 on Kickstarter, a crowdfunding website. We selected 4,922 backers with a total of 442,793 pledges to identify backers' preferences. The results show that a backer is more likely to be persuaded by a project that is more similar to the backer's preferences. Our findings not only demonstrate the efficacy of backers' pledge history for predicting crowdfunding project success but also verify that a backer‐centric method can supplement the existing project‐centric approaches. Our model and findings enable crowdfunding platform agencies, fund‐seeking entrepreneurs, and investors to predict the success of a crowdfunding project.

Fueled by the explosive growth of Web 2.0 and social media, online investment communities have become a popular venue for individual investors to interact with each other. Investor opinions extracted from online investment communities capture “crowd wisdom” and have begun to play an important role in financial markets. Existing research confirms the importance of crowd wisdom in stock predictions, but fails to investigate factors influencing crowd performance (that is, crowd prediction accuracy). In order to help improve crowd performance, our research strives to investigate the impact of crowd characteristics on crowd performance. We conduct an empirical study using a large data set collected from a popular online investment community, StockTwits. Our findings show that experience diversity, participant independence, and network decentralization are all positively related to crowd performance. Furthermore, crowd size moderates the influence of crowd characteristics on crowd performance. From a theoretical perspective, our work enriches extant literature by empirically testing the relationship between crowd characteristics and crowd performance. From a practical perspective, our findings help investors better evaluate social sensors embedded in user‐generated stock predictions, based upon which they can make better investment decisions.