Funding for social impact or business success: The role of emotional variety in crowdfunded microlending

On crowdfunded microlending platforms, entrepreneurial narratives commonly frame ventures around either social (SVO) or economic (EVO) value orientations. Although not inherently conflicting, prior research shows that these value orientations can differ in their effects on funding performance, suggesting that the value orientations alone do not fully account for funders' decisions. Drawing on norm-based evaluation, we argue that narrative value orientations elicit distinct expectations among funders, leading them to evaluate whether the entrepreneur aligns with or violates those expectations. This alignment or misalignment, in turn, shapes their deservingness judgments through either moral or utility-based evaluation paths. Building on the emotions-as-social-information literature, we propose that emotional variety serves as a key cue influencing these paths and funding decisions, determining how value orientations translate into funding performance. Specifically, we hypothesize that high emotional variety accelerates funding for SVO narratives by facilitating deservingness judgments through a moral path, but slows funding for EVO narratives by hindering deservingness judgments through a utility-based path. We test the research model using two complementary studies: a field study based on Kiva platform data and a controlled online experiment. The results support our hypotheses, and additional experimental analyses further clarify the distinct evaluation paths activated by value orientations, through which emotional variety influences funders' deservingness judgments and funding decisions via inferential and affective mechanisms. By providing an alignment perspective, this study advances research on crowdfunded microlending, hybrid ventures, and entrepreneurial communication, while offering practical insights for entrepreneurs, microfinance institutions, and platform designers pursuing hybrid objectives.