Kourosh Shafi

• phd
• PostDoc Position at University of Florida

This study proposes a hybrid model of initial trust formation that highlights the role of social categorization and its interplay with both institutional trust and the individuating information about the party. Using data on 1,474 corporate venture capital (CVC) investments in European ventures and a case-control research design, we find that ventu...

Reward-based crowdfunding not only provides finance to entrepreneurs but also generates valuable information on their products’ potential demand, their feasibility, and customers’ satisfaction. This study investigates how information from the campaigns, relating to the funding amount raised in excess of target capital, delays (if any) in product de...

Lenders in Prosper, one of the largest lending markets in the U.S., reduce their activity when playing multistate Powerball or Mega Millions lottery jackpot becomes attractive. This finding suggests that the desire for sensation seeking is an underlying motivation for participating in peer-to-peer crowdfunding markets; the thrill of winning a large...

Equity crowdfunding can provide significant resources to new ventures. However, it is not clear how crowd investors decide which ventures to invest in. Building on prior work on professional investors as well as theories in behavioral decision-making, we examine the weight non-professional crowd investors place on criteria related to a start-up’s m...

Crowdfunding has gained traction as a mechanism to raise resources for entrepreneurial and artistic projects, yet there is little systematic evidence on the potential of crowdfunding for scientific research. We first briefly review prior research on crowdfunding and give an overview of dedicated platforms for crowdfunding research. We then analyze...

Regions’ share of total funding and total number of funded projects, by funding source. (PDF)

Selected correlations. (PDF)

Regressions using team averages of creator characteristics. (PDF)

Regressions excluding affiliation variables and using simple risk score. (PDF)

This paper is an exploratory attempt to understand gender-related differences in the behavior of investors in firms seeking equity financing. Using data from the Swedish equity crowdfunding platform FundedByMe, we find that female investors are less likely to invest in the equity of firms that are younger and high tech and have a higher percentage...

We investigate firms' pre-IPO corporate activity. We find that firms involved in extraordinary – i.e., beyond momentum – amounts of acquisitions, JVs, and alliances in the year leading up to their IPOs (1) are more likely to engage in post-IPO corporate activity; and (2) enter into their first post-IPO transaction twice as fast as other firms. Our...

Research summary: This study replicates Dushnitsky and Shaver (2009) in an institutional setting different from the United States, that is, the European venture capital market. We highlight the role played by this switch of boundary condition in influencing how legal defenses protect new ventures' knowledge from misappropriation and encourage the f...

We investigate how public policies related to product market regulation (PMR) influence the ability of European young venture-capital (VC) backed firms compared to a sample of matched non-VC backed firms to grow in size in proportion to their innovative activity. Whereas VCs can presumably offer value-added services to overcome the regulatory const...

Reward-based crowdfunding not only provides finance to entrepreneurs but also generates valuable information on their products’ potential demand, their feasibility, and customers’ satisfaction. This study investigates how information from the campaigns, relating to the funding amount raised in excess of target capital, delays (if any) in product de...

Theories of initial trust formation posit two distinct perspectives, an institutional and a cognitive account. In an effort to overcome this conceptual impasse, we investigate relevant sources of institutional and cognitive trust in an integrative model and empirically assess the relative importance of each view. We use the context of new venture’s...