Certification by online analysts and early investors can generate excitement among potential token investors, leading to successful initial coin offerings (ICOs). We test the general notion of "wisdom of crowds" using novel data on nearly 3,400 ICOs, including sequential investor subscriptions...

Economic activities such as crowdfunding often involve sequential interactions, observational learning, and project implementation contingent on achieving certain thresholds of support. We incorporate endogenous all-or-nothing thresholds in a classic model of information cascade. We find that...

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, new financial technology (fintech) start-ups have emerged to challenge the long-established position of financial services incumbents. Drawing on resource-based theory and institutional theory, we investigate how the emergence of fintech start-ups...

This paper provides an overview of the economics of influencers and social media stardom. It presents the state-of-research regarding success factors, revenue and payment models, social media platforms and ecosystems, and welfare effects. It describes the role of social media content providers...

We propose a theory of rational "Rush", emphasizing the quantity of rational over-investment in contrast to the theory of irrational price "Bubble". We illustrate an important friction when financing breakthrough innovations: non-excludability and spillover of uncertain knowledge due to...

This paper develops a theory of how angel and venture capital markets interact. Entrepreneurs first receive angel then venture capital funding. The two investor types are 'friends' in that they rely upon each other's investments. However, they are also 'foes', because at the later stage the...

Peer-to-peer (P2P) services allow users to share networked resources, notably bandwidth and content, from the edges of the network. These services have been popularized because of file sharing - particularly the sharing of unlicensed copyrighted files. Concerns about such P2P file sharing were...

This paper revisits the concept of entrepreneurship, which is frequently neglected in mainstream economics, and discusses the importance of defining and isolating this concept in the context of large, publicly held companies. Compensating for entrepreneurial services in such companies, ex ante...

This paper studies the impact of diversity in cognitive ability among members of a team on their performance. We conduct a large field experiment in which teams start up and manage real companies under identical circumstances. Exogenous variation in - otherwise random - team composition is...

One of the most salient and relevant dimensions of team heterogeneity is ethnicity. We measure the impact of ethnic diversity on the performance of business teams using a field experiment. We follow 550 students who set up 45 real companies as part of their curriculum in an international...