The Geography of Crowdfunding

Submitted by catalini
on Sat, 03/26/2011 - 00:00

Ajay K. Agrawal, Christian Catalini, Avi Goldfarb

NBER Working Paper No. 16820
Issued in February 2011
NBER Program(s):   PR

Perhaps the most striking feature of "crowdfunding" is the broad geographic dispersion of investors in small, early-stage projects. This contrasts with existing theories that predict entrepreneurs and investors will be co-located due to distance-sensitive costs. We examine a crowdfunding setting that connects artist-entrepreneurs with investors over the internet for financing musical projects.

Serious bug in STATA's insheet command

Submitted by catalini
on Mon, 09/26/2011 - 00:00

I've come across a bug in STATA's insheet command that is quite worrisome.

Many power users will have their original datasets in raw text format. This is often the case for data coming from a variety of sources (public datasets, data downloaded or scraped from the Internet, etc). Not only it is a good habit to store data as raw text, but it also reduces lock-in with a specific platform or software. You are more likely to open that file again in 5-10 years if it's in a pure text format.

A common format for raw text files is the tab-delimited one, as tabs rarely appear in data.

Tags: 
STATA
bug

The Next 36 first cohort: Tradyo wins Best Venture Award

Submitted by catalini
on Tue, 08/16/2011 - 00:00

From Tradyo.com: "We have cool stuff; you have cool stuff; everyone has cool stuff. The problem is, half of our stuff goes unused when it could be super valuable to someone else. Tradyo enables people to buy and barter the things they don't use with their neighbours in a simple, convenient, and downright fun way. Tradyo uses the GPS function on your smartphone to reveal the cool stuff available around you. The app is curiosity driven - who knows what kind of treasure you'll stumble upon?"

 http://www.tradyo.com 

Tags: 
Next 36

Intellectual Property Disclosure in Open Standards Development

Submitted by catalini
on Sat, 03/26/2011 - 00:00

Timothy Simcoe and Christian Catalini

Firms typically want to know whether a technology is covered by Intellectual Property (IP) rights before making it an industry standard. To promote transparency, Standard Setting Organizations require participants to disclose their IP during technical deliberations. We study the effectiveness of these policies. Specifically, we examine a large sample of IP disclosures and find that these declarations are often not very informative.

Tags: 
standards
SSO
IP

Does Distance Matter in Online Entrepreneurial Finance? Evidence from Crowd-Funding in the Arts

Submitted by catalini
on Sun, 10/31/2010 - 00:00

Ajay Agrawal, Christian Catalini, Avi Goldfarb

Abstract

The most striking feature of “crowd-funding” for early stage entrepreneurial projects is the broad geographic dispersion of investors. This stands in stark contrast to existing theories that predict entrepreneurs and investors will be co-located due to distance-sensitive costs.

Tags: 
crowdfunding

Crowdfunding paper wins summer grant from NET institute

Submitted by catalini
on Mon, 06/28/2010 - 00:00

The working paper on the geography of crowd-funding I've been working on with Ajay Agrawal and Avi Goldfarb, received a summer grant from the NET institute.

 About the NET institute: "The Networks, Electronic Commerce and Telecommunications ("NET") Institute is a non-profit institution devoted to research on network industries, electronic commerce, telecommunications, the Internet, "virtual networks" comprised of computers that share the same technical standard or operating system, and on network issues in general.

Tags: 
crowdfunding
NET institute

Tracing the links between science and technology: An exploratory analysis of scientists’ and inventors’ networks

Submitted by catalini
on Fri, 03/26/2010 - 00:00

The paper provides an exploratory analysis of the research networks linking scientists working in an open science environment, and researchers involved in the private technology domain. The study combines data on scientific co-authorship with data on patent co-invention, at the level of individual researchers, for three science-intensive technology fields, i.e. lasers, semiconductors and biotechnology, in order to assess the extent of the overlap between the two communities and to identify the role of key individuals in the process of knowledge transfer.

Tags: 
science
technology
social network analysis

SSO patents and disclosures database

Submitted by catalini
on Sat, 08/08/2009 - 00:00

This page links to a database containing information from the combined IPR disclosure statements made at several major Standard Setting Organizations. Please let us know if you find a new use for this information. If you have questions, or would like to help us collect more data on IPRs linked to industry standards, please contact either Tim or Christian using the links on the website.

http://www.ssopatents.org

A first draft of the paper behind the dataset will be presented by Tim at the AoM annual meeting in Chicago (TIM, BPS) on Monday, August 10th from 8:00-9:30am:

Markets Making Music - Sellaband and Angie Arsenault

Submitted by catalini
on Tue, 02/10/2009 - 00:00

From Events and Media Relations @ Rotman:

"Synopsis: In 1999, an unknown Northeastern University student named Shawn Fanning released – with little fanfare – a program for sharing music over the Internet. Despite its modest dorm room origins, that innovation and subsequent permutations had a devastating effect on the recorded music industry worldwide. In Canada, for example, revenues declined by a stunning 50% between 1999 and 2007, after adjusting for inflation.

The link between science and technology: exploring the network of inventors and scientific authors in the semiconductor industry

Submitted by catalini
on Wed, 07/16/2008 - 00:00

The interaction between science and technology (S&T) is a complex and heterogeneous process. Knowledge flows between the communities of “Open Science” and “Proprietary technology” are usually local in terms of technological, geographical or social proximity. The aim of this study is to quantify knowledge spillovers between S&T, using the bibliographic references contained in patents as “paper trails”. Patent documents and cited scientific articles are used to build a comprehensive social network of authors and inventors in the semiconductor industry.

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