Serial and large investors in initial coin offerings

Dmitri Boreiko () and Dimche Risteski ()
Additional contact information
Dmitri Boreiko: Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
Dimche Risteski: Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition

Small Business Economics, 2021, vol. 57, issue 2, No 24, 1053-1071

Abstract: Abstract This study is the first to provide systematic evidence regarding investor behaviour in initial coin offerings (ICOs), their investment patterns and their role in the success of campaigns. Using hand-collected data on 472 public token sales over the period of 2013–2017, we advance the ICO literature by demonstrating that some contributors often invest in more than one campaign, and such serial investors contribute earlier. However, they are not more informed and fail to pick better-quality ICOs. Only large serial investors invest more in campaigns that raise more funds, attract more contributors, are more likely to reach their hard caps, and distribute tokens that are listed on crypto exchange. Our findings raise the question of whether regulatory or industry self-regulation agreements on information provision measures are needed to protect smaller retail ICO investors that exhibit naïve reinforcement learning behaviour.

Keywords: Token sales; Initial coin offerings; Serial investors; Blockchain; G11; G32; M13; O16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11187-020-00338-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:sbusec:v:57:y:2021:i:2:d:10.1007_s11187-020-00338-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... 29/journal/11187/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11187-020-00338-8

Access Statistics for this article

Small Business Economics is currently edited by Zoltan J. Acs and David B. Audretsch

More articles in Small Business Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().