Topic：Operation Dumbo Drop: To Airdrop or Not to Airdrop forInitial Coin Offering Success? 
Speaker：Dr. Hsing Kenneth Cheng (鄭興)
The John B. Higdon Eminent Scholar and Department Chair of Department of Information Systems and Operations Management, Warrington College ofBusiness at the University of Florida. 
Date：111.9.23(五)下午2:00-4:00
Venue：CM4069, NSYSU

Abstract：
  The rapid advancement and adoption of blockchain technology have heralded an explosive growth of Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) as a new and popular fundraising approach for blockchain start-ups. To motivate blockchain individuals to invest in the subsequent ICO, a growing number of blockchain-based project founders employ an airdrop campaign through which they distribute a specific amount of free official tokens or promotion tokens to potential investors on the blockchain with or without their permission. Of paramount concern to the blockchain companies contemplating whether to launch an airdrop campaign are whether the airdrop campaign has a positive effect on the potential investors’ investment behaviors in their ICOs, and how the efficacy of the airdrop may vary with their characteristics. To address these critical questions, we implement a regression discontinuity design by leveraging the quasi-randomization of a blockchain project’s promotional airdrop campaign on the Ethereum platform. We find that the promotional airdrop leads to a 2.3 times increase in the potential investors’ ICO investment probability, as well as their investment amount. We further find that the airdrop is more effective in increasing the investment probability for individuals whose personality traits are dissimilar to the blockchain project than those similar to the project and this effect is driven by the information channel mechanism. We also find that the token airdrop can motivate token receivers to stick with the focal project for a longer period. Our study contributes to the literature on ICOs, promotional marketing, and personality similarity, and provides important and useful managerial implications to blockchain companies on whether and how to launch an airdrop campaign. 

Keywords：
Initial coin offerings (ICO); Airdrop; Token drop; Personality similarity; Natural language processing; Regression discontinuity design

About Speaker：
  Dr. Hsing Kenneth Cheng is the John B. Higdon Eminent Scholar and Department Chair of Department of Information Systems and Operations Management, Warrington College of Business at the University of Florida. Dr. Cheng’s research interests focus on analyzing the impact of Internet technology on software development and marketing, and information systems policy issues.  He was ranked 20th (for the period of 2009-2011), 16th (2010-2012), and 32nd (2015-2020) among the world’s top-100 researchers in information systems based on publications in the top three information systems journals. Dr. Cheng has co-edited several special issues in various information systems journals, and served as an Associate Editor of Information Systems Research for 2011-2014. He is currently an Associate Editor of Decision Sciences, and Senior Editor of Decision Support Systems, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, and Information Systems and e-Business Management.  He has served on the program committee of many information systems conferences and workshops, and was a program co-chair for the Workshop on E-Business (2003, 2012), and Taiwan Summer Workshop on Information Management (2013, 2018).