Determinants of ICO Investment Decision: An Exploratory Factor Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
An Initial Coin Offering (ICO) is a funding mechanism used by projects to sell their crypto-token in exchange for Bitcoin, Ether, etc. It is the counterpart of the Initial Public Offering in the new digital currency economy. ICOs help projects to be funded in a short time with a high-profit margin.The primary purpose of this study is isolating the principal factors that affect the decision to invest in an ICO. A large array of potential signals, consisting of promotion and marketing effects, investor motivation, founder team effects, whitepaper and ICO specific factors, are considered in an online survey and the responses are analyzed using Exploratory Factor Analysis.The results of the analysis reveal five composite principal factors that determine the decision to invest in an ICO. These five principal factors are the ICO whitepaper, websites for finance news and ICO listings, ICO project sector and founder, ICO project team and social media. Our findings provide a perspective to both investor and ICO founders about which factors to prioritize when deciding to launch an ICO or to invest in one.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".