Overfunding of crowdfunded product-development projects would seem to be a welcome outcome for entrepreneurs, yet initial theory and evidence suggest that overfunding can have both positive and negative consequences. To overcome these contradictory predictions, we develop theory linking research on slack resources, audience expectations, and product category spanning to hypothesize boundary conditions for whether and when overfunding has a positive or negative effect on the product-development outcomes of product release and audience-perceived product quality. Post-crowdfunding data on video-game development projects show that entrepreneurs with high-category-spanning products benefit substantially less from overfunding than entrepreneurs with low-category-spanning products. Our study provides novel insights into the relation between overfunding and product release as well as audience-perceived product quality. It also contributes to our emerging understanding of the role of categories in the context of crowdfunding. We discuss implications for theory and practice.

众筹产品开发项目的过度资助似乎是企业家欢迎的结果，但初步理论和证据表明，过度资助可能会产生积极和消极的后果。为了克服这些相互矛盾的预测，我们开发了理论，将对冗余资源、受众期望和产品类别跨越的研究联系起来，以假设边界条件，以确定过度资助是否以及何时对产品发布和受众感知的产品开发结果产生积极或消极影响产品质量。视频游戏开发项目的众筹后数据显示，与产品类别跨度低的企业家相比，拥有高类别跨度产品的企业家从过度筹资中获益要少得多。我们的研究对过度资助和产品发布以及观众感知的产品质量之间的关系提供了新颖的见解。它还有助于我们逐渐理解类别在众筹背景下的作用。我们讨论对理论和实践的影响。