A Spatiotemporal Analysis of Adoption Behavior at a Crowdfunding Platform

Recently crowdfunding has emerged as an important source of funding for creative projects and ventures around the world. In this paper we examine how peer adoption of crowdfunding influences a spatial diffusion of crowdfunding adoption by creators over time. We obtained data on the creation of crowdfunded projects from a leading crowdfunding campaign from 2009 to 2013. We find that creators from socially similar areas are influential to later creators while those from geographically proximate areas are rarely influential. Furthermore, the influence of creators from socially similar areas generally increases over time. Overall, our study provides an insight into the spatial diffusion of crowdfunding and offers implications for platform providers and project creators

How does Bond Market View IT investments of Firms? An Empirical Evidence of Bond Ratings and Yield Spreads

This study investigates the business value of information technology (IT) in terms of performance in bond markets, which constitute the single largest source for firms’ financing. We evaluate risk-adjusted benefits of IT investments in the bond market in the United States over the 1995-2002 period. We find a significant association between a firm’s IT intensity and bond ratings at issuance. The results also indicate that the impact of IT on the cost of debt is different across industries. IT investments have a favorable influence on the cost of debt in automate and informate industries but not in transform industries. This finding from the bond markets differs from that in prior equity market findings which report higher returns to IT investments in transform industries. These findings suggest that bondholders and shareholders have different perspectives toward IT investments

REWARD VERSUS PHILANTHROPY MOTIVATION IN CROWDFUNDING BEHAVIOR

Crowdfunding is an online platform service that helps creators develop their projects by collecting small amounts of money from the public. This paper examines the relationship between funder motivations and actual funding behavior on crowdfunding platforms. We combine two types of datasets; namely, funder surveys and actual transaction data, to empirically probe the dynamics among reward motivation, philanthropy motivation, funding timing, and funding amount. We further examine how the dynamics are moderated by funders’ demographic characteristics. We find that reward motivation is associated with late funding, whereas philanthropic motivation is associated with early funding. When it comes to the funding amount, philanthropy motivation is positively associated with the amount of funding, especially in the earlier stages before reaching the goal amount. On the other hand, the effect of reward motivation on funding amount is, on average, positive, although very marginal. Overall, our results provide new insights for theories of contributions in crowd-driven markets

The Transformational Role of IT in Entrepreneurship: Crowdfunding and the Democratization of Access to Capital and Investment Opportunity

My dissertation examines the strategic impacts of IT-enabled platforms on entrepreneurial and innovation activities. Specifically, I explore the behaviors of both investors and entrepreneurs in online crowdfunding markets that have the potential to democratize access to capital and investment opportunities. In my first essay, I examine the role of experts in a crowdfunding market. While conventional wisdom considers a crowdfunding market as a mechanism to democratize decision making and reduce reliance on experts, I find that experts still play a pivotal role in these markets. In particular, I find that the early investments by experts serve as credible signals of quality for the crowd, and have a significant impact on the crowd's investment decisions. In my second essay, I analyze whether crowdfunding democratizes access to capital for entrepreneurs. I find that difficult access to credit from traditional sources induces entrepreneurs to rely more on crowdfunding as a viable alternative, while this effect varies across project types and across areas. In each essay, I analyze micro-level data from online crowdfunding markets with a variety of econometric methods. The results have important theoretical and practical implications for questions ranging from the design of online crowdfunding markets to competition between online and offline channels for funding and regional dynamics of crowdfunding

The Impact of Bike-Sharing Services on Local Business

Despite the potential of bike-sharing services to influence the local economy, the impact of these services on local businesses has been overlooked. Hence, this research aims to examine how a bike-sharing program influences the success of local businesses. We analyzed sales data of 2,928 local restaurants recorded from February to August 2019, along with bike rentals made near the restaurants. Our findings show that the number of bike rentals around a restaurant is positively associated with its sales. Further, the impact of bike rentals intensifies when there are more subway passengers around the restaurants but weakens with more bus passengers. Moreover, non-franchise and less-popular restaurants benefit more from bike-sharing programs. Our findings offer significant contributions to the existing literature by theorizing the value of sharing economy in the local economy. Practically, our results provide strategic implications for policymakers, bike-sharing service providers, and local businesses to effectively use sharing economy programs

Industry-Specific Human Capital and Wages: Evidence from the Business Process Outsourcing Industry

Human capital is becoming more critical as the global economy becomes more information intensive and service intensive. While IS researchers have studied some dimensions of human capital, the role of industry-specific human capital has remained understudied. The IT-enabled business process outsourcing (BPO) industry provides an ideal setting to study returns to human capital, because jobs in this industry are standardized and many professionals in this new industry have come from other industries. We build on IS and Economics literature to theorize returns to human capital in the BPO industry, and we test the theory using data for over 2,500 BPO professionals engaged in call center work and other non-voice services (e.g., accounting, finance, HR, etc.) in India during the 2006-2008 time period. We find higher returns to industry-specific human capital than to firm-specific and general human capital. We also find that junior-level professionals, whose jobs are relatively more standardized, have higher returns to industry-specific human capital than senior-level professionals. We discuss implications for further research and practice in the global economy where inter-industry transfers and migration of skills are becoming increasingly common

Crowdfunding Success as a Quality Signal to Venture Capital

This study examines how venture capitals (VCs) value crowd-based decisions compared to expert decisions from the perspective of signaling theory. We collect data on both crowd-funded startups and matching angel-funded startups. We track sequential financing rounds and analyze whether VCs show different valuations of the two types of startups. Our results show no statistically significant difference in VC preference between crowd-funded startups and angel-funded startups. In terms of initial funding amount, we show that startups raising large amounts on a crowdfunding platform are more likely to attract the attention of VCs than startups obtaining similar amount of funding from angel investors. We also find that the effect of crowdfunding is stronger for startups located in startup cluster areas. Finally, our results support the view that securing funding from the crowd increases the chances of obtaining follow-on VC funding for the non-hardware startups

Soft but Strong: Software-Based Innovation, Product Market Competition, and Value Creation in the IT Hardware Industry

We study the impact of software-based innovation on the value of patented inventions, firms™ competitive position in the product market, and the market value of the firms in the U.S. information and technology (IT) hardware industry. Our analysis of ove