To induce innovation, should we praise the prizes?

Innovation is a tricky economic activity: its input (R&D) is very costly, its production process is highly uncertain and …

A primer on cumulative innovations

(This post aims at digging the concept of cumulative innovation. It is based on Section 19.3 of Belleflamme and …

3 master theses about crowdfunding

Every academic year at the Louvain School of Management, about 500 master theses are defended. Research topics span all …

The multisidedness of crowdfunding platforms

A number of posts on this blog have already dealt with multisided platforms (see here) and with crowdfunding (see …

Crowdfunding: giving rewards or sharing profits?

As already explained on this blog, crowdfunding has recently emerged as a novel way of financing new ventures. The basic …

A ‘multisourced’ case-study of a multisided platform

To paraphrase a famous Belgian surrealist artist: “This post is not a post“. More precisely, it is not a …

When sheiks and cheques shake the media

  A media bias is defined by Wikipedia as the bias or perceived bias of journalists and news producers …

What drives self-regulation in the nascent P2P “ride-sharing” industry?

The American company Uber has been all over the news in Belgium over the last three weeks. Uber connects passengers …

How do comparison shopping sites make a living?

Comparison shopping sites, also known as shopping robots or shopbots, have been around for about two decades. Sites such …

Prezi: a successful freemium model?

Last year, I had to deliver a speech about the economics of Internet to a non-technical audience. To make …