증권형 크라우드펀딩 투자설명서 형태소분석을 통한 투자자 보호방안에 관한 연구

A Study on Investor Protection through Morphological Analysis of Equity Crowdfunding Investment Manual

An equity crowdfunding system of Korea has been introduced since January 25, 2016. The crowdfunding has contributed to remove the funding gap for startups in Korea. In the three years since the introduction of the system, the amount issued has been growing annually 31 percent. In 2018, the general investors who participated in equity crowdfunding, account for 93.8% of the total market size. General investors are a large part of equity crowdfunding. Investors, however, are facing the information asymmetry problems. General investors rely heavily on the investment prospectus provided by startups to obtain the information they need to determine their investment decisions. Under these circumstances, startups have the incentive to provide information that is advantageous to them, and investors are likely to be adversely affected by the investment prospectus. In this study, we collected the novel crowdfunding prospectus dataset: a total of 459 investment prospectus and conducted a morphological analysis. The analysis showed that the more positive the word, the higher the success rate of investors subscriptions. We also compared projects that were heavily invested by general investors with projects that were heavily invested by professional investors. Then, we were able to examine that the success rates of project subscription, which were heavily invested by general investors, were higher than the projects of professional investor type. It can be interpreted as a general investor driven crowdfunding market. Based on these results, we propose three policies. First, the supervisor should be strengthened to provide more detailed information on investment risk factors in the prospectus. Second, the crowdfunding intermediary should monitor information provided by startups. Third, an investor should be asked to add a question to the investment compliance test that allows the investor to recognize the problem in the manual.