[LINK TO FULL DOCUMENT https://www.uni-trier.de/fileadmin/fb4/prof/BWL/MIT/Download/13-WS_1819/ICO_Survey_Results_FischMasiak_10102018.pdf]

Empirical evidence on ICO investors is lacking and the current discussion mostly relies on anecdotes. We do not really know who invests in ICOs and why. We decided to approach this topic in an explorative and quantiative fashion and designed a survey that focusses on ICO investments.

As you may remember, we collected data between June and August 2018. A lot of people from Bitcointalk joined. As promised, we analyzed the data and compiled a document that assesses the data collected in the survey: https://www.uni-trier.de/fileadmin/fb4/prof/BWL/MIT/Download/13-WS_1819/ICO_Survey_Results_FischMasiak_10102018.pdf

Again, we want to thank you for helping us out. Hopefully you will finde some of the findings interesting!

Some points:
- Most of the 517 respondents reside in the US (14.7%), Germany (11.6%), and the Netherlands (9.5%). 95% were male. The average age was 33 years. However, there is a large heterogeneity with regard to country of residence and age. The average level of education is rather high: 80% of the respondents had a Bachelor‘s degree or higher. The most common field of studies was business or economics (32.3%), followed by computer sciences (22.8%). Most respondents were employed (48.9%) or self-employed (36.4%). 38.7% had a professional background in technology.

- Contrary to popular belief, investors do not seem to be inexperienced: 51.8% rate their investment knowledge outside the cryptosphere as ‘good’ or ‘very good’. More specifically, investors stated that they had previously invested in stocks (41.6%), funds (42.2%), or real estate (30.0%). Only 19.1% had no prior investment experience.

- Very interesting findings emerge with regard to the money invested (p. 17). Investment volumes are almost equally distributed across categories, indicating a considerable heterogeneity among investors. For example, 11.4% of respondents invested less then 250 USD in total, while 8.3% investsted more than 100,000 USD. It is thus very difficult to characterize the „average investor in ICOs“ with regard to the money invested.

- The most important motive (p. 21–23) for investing in ICOs is the ‘future sale of the token at a higher price (at a later point in time)’. However, this motive is immediately followed by ‘personal enthusiasm for the business model or business idea’ and ‘personal enthusiasm for the technology’. The differences between those motives are marginal and not statistically significant. It can be concluded that most investors are not singularly interested in profits.

We cannot proof that. We will carefully analyze the survey demographics and state them. There is no comparison group so far, as noone has ever studied ICO investor's so far.
In our data collection, we spread the survey pretty far. But of course institutional investors or the like will be underrepresented.

Thank you for these questions. We decided to deliberately focus on ICO investors only. We did this mainly for methodological reasons: it is very difficult to get a representative sample of non-ICO investors, as this (theoretically) also applies to people that simply do not know about ICOs at all. Describing the sample will be a crucial point in an eventual peer-review, so we tried to keep it a bit more simple. Anyway, the snowball technique we used will be something that the reviewers point out as a limitation, but hopefully it won't be a deal-breaker.

So, as this is an initial study, there are many things to explore further in the future! This also applies to a comparison with Crowdfunding, VC, and business angels!

Actually, I have already written a paper from the ICO perspective, which is currently under review and available here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323958952_Initial_coin_offerings_ICOs_to_finance_new_ventures_An_exploratory_study

This paper shows, for example, that start-ups can raise more money by having a longer white paper and issue more tokens (which is funny and underlines the irrationality of some investors, because the number of tokens is completely arbitrary ... ).

We plan to wrap up the data collection this weekend and will start analyzing. So far, 425 participated in the survey!
As a final call: Any help in filling out or promoting this survey would be greatly appreciated: https://www.unipark.de/uc/ICOs/

Thanks a lot, much appreciated!

We plan to wrap up the data collection this weekend and will start analyzing. So far, 425 participated in the survey!
As a final call: Any help in filling out or promoting this survey would be greatly appreciated: https://www.unipark.de/uc/ICOs/

We are two university researchers from Trier University (GER) and the Erasmus University Rotterdam (NL). We try to investigate why people invest in ICOs (decision criteria, motives, behavior) in an empirical fashion. Any help in filling out or promoting this survey would be greatly appreciated: https://www.unipark.de/uc/ICOs/

As a reward for your participation, you will receive a detailed report of the results. This report will give you actionable insights on how to optimize your investment strategy and will most importantly allow you to benchmark your decision making to a large sample of ICO investors. Also, the report will reveal interesting information about specific aspects of ICOs, such as investor motivations, the opinion on white papers, regulation, and many more. The results of the study and all related publications will be published Open Access and freely available.

Finally, if we reach 500 participants or more, we will hold an Ethereum raffle in which we will distribute 0.5 ETH to a randomly chosen person.

I'm a university researcher (GER/NL) and try to investigate why people invest in ICOs (decision criteria, motives, behavior) in an empirical fashion. We would be very glad to win your participation in the survey as we really feel that this study might help to address a lot of open questions surrounding ICOs. Any help in filling out this survey would thus be greatly appreciated: https://www.unipark.de/uc/ICOs/

As a reward for your participation, you will receive a detailed report of the results. This report will give you actionable insights on how to optimize your investment strategy and will most importantly allow you to benchmark your decision making to a large sample of ICO investors. Also, the report will reveal interesting information about specific aspects of ICOs, such as investor motivations, the opinion on white papers, regulation, and many more. The results of the study and all related publications will be published Open Access and freely available.

Finally, if we reach 500 participants or more, we will hold an Ethereum raffle in which we will distribute 0.5 ETH to a randomly chosen person.

Interesting research, looking forward to the results.
Will you share them here?

I understand your concerns. The problem is that I do this survey as part of my regular job (= there is no external funding behind it), which means that I have to pay incentives out of my own pocket and I simply cannot afford to pay 0.5 ETH to everyone.

Also, if everyone would receive 0.5 ETH this would attract people that have never invested in an ICO and still fill out the survey. The thing with incentives in research is always that they should be strong enough to incentivize real respondents to some extent, but are not enough to encourage "fake" respondent.

Also, I think that the information you can receive from this survey is woth more than the ETH. But of course, this is difficult to grasp and may not motivate

Still: Thank you for considering the survey, any help is truly appreciated! 

Danke -- ein kurzes Update.
Wir suchen immer noch Teilnehmer, sind aber inzwischen schon bei 250 Antworten: https://www.unipark.de/uc/ICOs/

Als Dankeschön für die Teilnahme erhaltet ihr nicht nur einen detaillierten Ergebnisbericht, sondern wir verlosen auch 0,5 ETH unter den Teilnehmern.

Falls Fragen sind beantworte ich diese natürlich gerne!

I'm a university researcher (GER/NL) and try to investigate why people invest in ICOs (decision criteria, motives, behavior) in an empirical fashion. We would be very glad to win your participation in the survey as we really feel that this study might help to address a lot of open questions surrounding ICOs. Any help in filling out this survey would thus be greatly appreciated:

https://www.unipark.de/uc/ICOs/

As a reward for your participation, you will receive a detailed report of the results. This report will give you actionable insights on how to optimize your investment strategy and will most importantly allow you to benchmark your decision making to a large sample of ICO investors. Also, the report will reveal interesting information about specific aspects of ICOs, such as investor motivations, the opinion on white papers, regulation, and many more. The results of the study and all related publications will be published Open Access and freely available.

Finally, if we reach 500 participants or more, we will hold an Ethereum raffle in which we will distribute 0.5 ETH to a randomly chosen person.

If you have any questions, suggestions, feedback, shoot!

I'm a university researcher (GER/NL) and try to investigate why people invest in ICOs (decision criteria, motives, behavior) in an empirical fashion. We would be very glad to win your participation in the survey as we really feel that this study might help to address a lot of open questions surrounding ICOs. Any help in filling out this survey would thus be greatly appreciated:

https://www.unipark.de/uc/ICOs/

As a reward for your participation, you will receive a detailed report of the results. This report will give you actionable insights on how to optimize your investment strategy and will most importantly allow you to benchmark your decision making to a large sample of ICO investors. Also, the report will reveal interesting information about specific aspects of ICOs, such as investor motivations, the opinion on white papers, regulation, and many more. The results of the study and all related publications will be published Open Access and freely available.

Finally, if we reach 500 participants or more, we will hold an Ethereum raffle in which we will distribute 0.5 ETH to a randomly chosen person.

If you have any questions, suggestions, feedback, shoot!

We (Trier University, GER and Erasmus University, NL) are currently conducting a survey to answer the question why people invest in ICOs (and more) in an empirical fashion. We also include many questions on the respondents educational background and investments experience that shed light on what is discussed here.

If you have ever invested in an ICO, please help us by answering the following survey: https://www.unipark.de/uc/ICOs/ Your help is greatly appreciated.

The results of the study and all related publications will be published Open Access and freely available. Also, if we reach 500 participants or more, we will hold an Ethereum raffle in which we will distribute 0.5 ETH to a randomly chosen person.

We (Trier University, GER and Erasmus University, NL) are currently conducting a survey to answer the question why people invest in ICOs (and more) in an empirical fashion. If you have ever invested in an ICO, please help us by answering the following survey: https://www.unipark.de/uc/ICOs/ Your help is greatly appreciated.

The results of the study and all related publications will be published Open Access and freely available. Also, if we reach 500 participants or more, we will hold an Ethereum raffle in which we will distribute 0.5 ETH to a randomly chosen person.

Why do people invest in ICOs? Which factors matter most? We (Trier University, GER and Erasmus University, NL) are currently conducting a survey to answer these questions (and more) in an empirical fashion. If you have ever invested in an ICO, please help us by answering the following survey: https://www.unipark.de/uc/ICOs/

Your help is greatly appreciated!

The results of the study and all related publications will be published Open Access and freely available. Also, if we reach 500 participants or more, we will hold an Ethereum raffle in which we will distribute 0.5 ETH to a randomly chosen person.

I am happy to answer any questions that you might have.

I'm a university researcher (GER/NL) and try to investigate why people invest in ICOs (decision criteria, motives, behavior) in an empirical fashion. Any help in filling out this survey would be greatly appreciated: https://www.unipark.de/uc/ICOs/

We would be very glad to win your participation in the survey as we really feel that this study might help to address a lot of open questions surrounding ICOs. Please do not hesitate to ask any questions. If you have any suggestions, I would also be glad to hear them.

The results of the study and all related publications will be published Open Access and freely available. Also, if we reach 500 participants or more, we will hold an Ethereum raffle in which we will distribute 0.5 ETH to a randomly chosen person.

As an update:
We are still looking for participants. If you have ever invested in an ICO, please help us by answering the following survey: https://www.unipark.de/uc/ICOs/ Your help is greatly appreciated.

Also, if we reach 500 participants or more, we will hold an Ethereum raffle in which we will distribute 0.5 ETH to a randomly chosen person.

Why do people invest in ICOs? Which factors matter most? We (Trier University, GER and Erasmus University, NL) are currently conducting a survey to answer these questions (and more) in an empirical fashion. If you have ever invested in an ICO, please help us by answering the following survey: https://www.unipark.de/uc/ICOs/

Your help is greatly appreciated.

The results of the study and all related publications will be published Open Access and freely available. Also, if we reach 500 participants or more, we will hold an Ethereum raffle in which we will distribute 0.5 ETH to a randomly chosen person.

Good luck; looks interesting.

Let me give you one other example of what we intend to do (if we get enough responses for the analyses to be meaningful):
Lets assume everyone only does it for the money, we could still differentiate investors according to their decision making. Some inform themselves about projects and invest for money. Others inform themselves about bonusses and potential revenues (not about the ICO's technology) and invest for money. Others don't inform themselves at all and only follow hype.
Tha would also be a pretty interesting finding.

We also have an item in there of whether people invest in ICOs when the price of BTC/Ether is high OR low. This is actually an interesting question as either answer would suggest that ICOs should occur depending on the price of BTC/ETH.