We use hand-collected data from four German crowdinvesting portals to analyze what determines individual investment decisions in crowdinvesting. In contrast with the crowdfunding campaigns on Kickstarter where the typical pattern of project support is U-shaped, we find crowdinvesting dynamics to be rather L-shaped under a first-come, first-serve mechanism and U-shaped under an auction mechanism. The evidence shows that investors base their decisions on information provided by the entrepreneur in form of updates during the campaign and by the investment behavior and comments of other crowd investors. Moreover, we find evidence for a collective attention effect and herding behavior.
