Hi, are you conducting your research from the perspective of an ''investor'' or also from the perspective of start-ups or corporates that are conducting an ICO?
Maybe both perspectives are interesting to research? Also, don't know if you are taking this into account as of yet, but are you looking into retail investors only or also VCs, Hedge Funds/Crypto Funds, and angel investors?
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_studyThis 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 ... ).