Heroes Within Limits: Disability Cue, Hero Narratives, and Shifting Standards in Crowdfunding
Type
conference paper
Date Issued
2026-10-19
Author(s)
Abstract
How do crowdfunding audiences evaluate entrepreneurs with disabilities, who can elicit both devaluation and admiration? Drawing on the shifting standards model, we argue that using a hero narrative attenuates the funding penalty these entrepreneurs face by leading backers to judge them against a lenient minimum standard, but that larger funding goals limit this benefit by shifting backers to a more demanding confirmatory standard. Using LLM-based annotations of 154,099 Kickstarter campaigns (2009–2023) and 2,134 matched pairs of campaigns with and without a disability cue, we find that a disability cue is associated with a 3.9-percentage-point lower probability of success. Stronger hero narrative increases success probability of entrepreneurs with disability, more than twice the gain for entrepreneurs without one. However, favorable evaluations of entrepreneurs with disabilities pay off only when their resource claims are modest. We offer large-scale field evidence on how entrepreneurs with disabilities are evaluated and show that the standard applied to stigmatized entrepreneurs shifts with the capability they claim through their funding goal, not with social category alone.
HSG Classification
contribution to scientific community
Refereed
No
Subject(s)
Division(s)