@inproceedings{ef61b18741b54ae7a4609d146de4134b,
title = "Open to everyone? The long tail of the peer economy: Evidence from Kickstarter",
abstract = "Peer-to-peer platforms remove entrance barriers characterizing traditional markets, thereby creating markets that are more democratized. Our work draws from the rich literature on the “long tail” to investigate how democratization of peer-to-peer markets affects distribution of demand. We utilize a natural experiment in the form of a policy change that occurred on Kickstarter.com and resulted in opening the market to more players, effectively raising the level of democratization. We examine how platform-openness affected the distribution of funds and backers across campaigns. Specifically, we ask whether removal of entrance barriers-which increased the quantity and variety of offers-shifted the demand from popular to niche offers (a long-tail effect). Our findings indicate that opening the platform shifted the demand towards the head: more funds and backers became concentrated in a smaller number of head-offers. We conclude that a more democratized peer-economy results in a less-even distribution of funds (a superstar effect).",
keywords = "Crowdfunding, Demand distribution, Kickstarter, Long tail, Peer-economy, Share-economy, Superstar effect",
author = "Ohad Barzilay and Anat Goldstein and Hilah Geva and Gal Oestreicher-Singer",
note = "Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} International Conference on Information Systems 2018, ICIS 2018.All rights reserved.; 39th International Conference on Information Systems, ICIS 2018 ; Conference date: 13-12-2018 Through 16-12-2018",
year = "2018",
month = jan,
day = "1",
language = "English",
series = "International Conference on Information Systems 2018, ICIS 2018",
publisher = "Association for Information Systems",
booktitle = "International Conference on Information Systems 2018, ICIS 2018",
address = "United States",
}