Certified by social networks: the role of social certifications in medical crowdfunding

Nowadays, medical crowdfunding platforms are faced with two challenges: the trustworthiness issue caused by inauthentic information provided by fundraisers and the trackability issue caused by insufficient information updates in the fundraising process. In the current research, we aim to examine the role of social certifications, a practice of turning fundraisers' social networks into social certifiers of crowdfunding campaigns, in mitigating these two issues. By establishing a panel vector autoregression model based on data from a Chinese medical crowdfunding platform, we find that social certifications promote the contributing behavior of backers, mitigating the trustworthiness issue. At the same time, social certifications facilitate the information-updating behavior of fundraisers, alleviating the trackability issue. We also find that the diversity and professionalism of social certifiers strengthen the influences of social certifications on backers and fundraisers. Besides, fundraisers' information-updating behavior promotes backers' contributing behavior. The results have significant theoretical and practical implications.