Confidence and capital raising

What determines initial coin offering success: a cross-country study

“…Indeed, our results supplement the findings of Chourou et al, who documented that IPOs in countries with high uncertainty avoidance scores tend to experience a lower level of underpricing, whereas IPOs in countries with higher masculinity tend to experience a higher level of underpricing, while Tan, Cheong, and Zurbruegg (2019) have shown that uncertainty avoidance and masculinity have an impact on an individual's trading behavior and risk taking. Finally, our results on culture show that ICO market interlinkages correspond well with the previously cited research by Huang, Vismara, and Wei (2021) on emotional factors supporting ICOs, such as investors' reactions to the appearance of the management staff of ICO beneficiary company. Moreover, our results complement to those presented by Fisch et al (2021) that underlined the hierarchy of investors' motives on the ICO market: technological, financial, ideological ones.…”

“…Another research strand refers to an experimental study on the role of management team appearance in building confidence in the success of an ICO fundraising campaign. Huang, Vismara, and Wei (2021) documented that ICO investors make their decisions without the advice of financial analysts and professional intermediaries. Thus, they conclude that emotional factors, such as the physical appearance of managers (available on the website of the ICO), can contribute to building confidence among investors.…”

The CEO Beauty Premium: Founder CEO Attractiveness and Firm Valuation in Initial Coin Offerings

“…Table 1 shows summary statistics and pairwise correlations between the variables (for variable definitions and data sources, see Table A1 in the Appendix). The summary statistics are comparable to other ICO studies (e.g., Fisch, 2019;Howell et al, 2020;Huang et al, 2021;Momtaz, 2020b). In particular, the founder CEO of 44% of the ICO firms in our sample is less than 30 years old, while only 6% of the founder CEOs are more than 40 years old.…”

“…Momtaz (2020c) finds that loyalty toward the founder CEOs' previous employers is positively related to ICO firm valuations. Other studies point to the influence of founder CEOs' facial expressions on firm valuation (Huang, Vismara, & Wei, 2021;Momtaz, 2021a), as well as to founder CEOs' language used in video pitches (Kolbe et al, 2021) and their emotions (Momtaz, 2021a(Momtaz, , 2021d.…”

Success factors of initial coin offerings

“…Although a growing number of studies investigate new ways to finance entrepreneurial ventures, which emerge on the crossroads between private and public equity (Audretsch et al, 2016;Butticè & Vismara, 2021), several emerging forms of finance have started making their way into entrepreneurial finance. Research on entrepreneurial finance will need to cope with collective-action problems, explaining the nuances of crowdfunding campaigns (Vismara, 2018(Vismara, , 2019, and further investigating the emerging role of "quasi" crowdfunding such as ICOs (Huang et al, 2020(Huang et al, , 2021Kher et al, 2020;Schückes & Gutmann, 2021). The general expectation is that both ICOs and equity crowdfunding "democratizes" entrepreneurial finance (Cumming et al, 2021), thereby increasing the possibility of various founders from different backgrounds raising finance (Fisch et al, 2020).…”