The local bias in equity crowdfunding: Behavioral anomaly or rational preference?

We use data on individual investment decisions to analyze whether investors in equity crowdfunding direct their investments to local firms and whether specific investor types can explain this behavior. We then examine whether investments exhibiting a local bias are more or less likely to fail. We show that investors exhibit a local bias, even when we control for those with personal ties to the entrepreneur. In particular, we find that angel‐like investors and investors with personal ties to the entrepreneur exhibit a larger local bias than regular crowd investors. Well‐diversified investors are less likely to suffer from this behavioral anomaly than investors with personal ties to the entrepreneur. Overall, we show that investors who direct their investments to local firms more often pick start‐ups that run into insolvency, which indicates that some local investments in equity crowdfunding constitute a behavioral anomaly rather than a rational preference. Moreover, our results reveal that platform design is an important factor determining the scope of the behavior anomaly.