Philipp Haas

An empirical taxonomy of crowdsourcing intermediaries

Due to the recent popularity of crowdfunding, a broad magnitude of crowdfunding intermediaries has emerged, while research on crowdfunding intermediaries has been largely neglected. As a consequence, existing classifications of crowdfunding intermediaries are conceptual, lack theoretical grounding, and are not empirically validated. Thus, we develop an empirical taxonomy of crowdfunding intermediaries, which is grounded in the theories of two-sided markets and financial intermediation. Integrating these theories, we develop a crowdfunding intermediation model that we use as foundation for performing cluster analysis with data of 127 intermediaries. We identify three generic archetypes of crowdfunding intermediaries, which differ in their value proposition: Hedonism, Altruism, and For Profit. Our crowdfunding intermediation model and our empirical taxonomy improve our understanding of crowdfunding by showing how crowdfunding intermediaries manage financial intermediation and digitally transform exchange relations between capital-giving and seeking agents in two-sided online markets. For practice, our research may help characterize the crowdfunding industry.

Crowdfunding: Outlining the New Era of Fundraising

Crowdfunding is increasingly gaining attention in theory and practice. Various platforms have emerged, offering entrepreneurs and project owners the possibility to raise money from an undefined group of online users (“crowd”). In this article we aim to provide a deeper understanding of the rise of crowdfunding as an alternative funding opportunity by discussing its main characteristics, the market development, different classification approaches, its fields of application and by providing directions for future research.

Accessing Knowledge with a Game -- A Meta-analysis of Prediction Markets

Prediction markets illustrate a promising solution to aggregate distributed knowledge playfully. Prediction markets are speculative markets. They are created to aggregate knowledge, which is distributed among the participants in the prediction market. Prediction markets have also been labeled as game market, decision market or virtual stock. The purpose of this study is to summarize recent studies according to the categories basic functionality, design, real or play money, implementation, success factors, and fields of application.

Obstacles and Challenges in the Use of Gamification for Virtual Idea Communities

Virtual idea communities (VIC) are a relatively new phenomenon in business. These communities, in which distributed groups of individual customers focus on voluntarily sharing and elaborating innovation ideas, are used by firms to integrate customers into the ideation for new product development rooted in Chesbrough’s (2003) open innovation paradigm. Developers and decision makers realised especially within the last decade that games or game-like appeals could serve as appropriate gamifications to attract people to participate in VICs. Therefore, gamification gained momentum and has been widely implemented into VICs. The use of gamification does, however, not lead to the intended positive outcomes per se. Because of that, obstacles and challenges in the use of gamification have to be considered, but these have often been neglected in practice. Therefore, the goal of this chapter is to address this topic and to describe major obstacles and challenges in the use of gamification in VICs.