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By relaxing the constraint of proximity to the investor, crowdfunding platforms promise to reshape the geography of small business and entrepreneurship. A necessary condition is that distance is no longer an impediment to the flow of funding between backers and project developers in different geographical areas. Information plays a central role, especially as the decision to invest in a project depends on information that seems to be highly sensitive to distance (trustworthiness and seriousness of the founder, experience of those involved). This specificity makes the existence of social ties between backers and founders a powerful way to convey information across space. The aims of this article are twofold. First, to estimate the role of distance in the geographical flow of crowdfunding and, secondly, to show how the existence of social ties between geographical areas can shape the flow of funding in a local context. Our analysis draws upon a unique database provided by the French leader in rewards-based crowdfunding. With a dataset containing 12 887 projects and 452 850 contributions, representing a value of €19 million over the period 2012–2015, we estimate, for each pair of the 94 French regions, the number and the amount of bilateral funding actions and their determinants in a gravity-like equation model. Social ties between regions are based on regional migration data from the 2013 French national census. The main result is that the elasticity of distance remains important (around 0.5) in the context of rewards-based crowdfunding platforms. We also show that the existence of social ties between regions not only determines the flow of funding – doubling the number of immigrants in a particular region increases the number of investments by 25% – it also strongly reduces and even cancels out (under some specifications) the impact of geographical distance.

Most developed countries have tried to restrain digital piracy by strength- ening laws against copyright infringement. In 2009, France implemented the Hadopi law. Under this law individuals receive a warning the first two times they are detected illegally sharing content through peer to peer (P2P) networks. Legal action is only taken when a third violation is detected. We analyze the impact of this law on individual behavior. Our theoretical model of illegal be- havior under a graduated response law predicts that the perceived probability of detection has no impact on the decision to initially engage in digital piracy, but may reduce the intensity of illegal file sharing by those who do pirate. We test the theory using survey data from French Internet users. Our econometric results indicate that the law has no substantial deterrent effect. In addition, we find evidence that individuals who are better informed about the law and piracy alternatives substitute away from monitored P2P networks and illegally access content through unmonitored channels.

This paper aims at investigating the process of involvement in open online communities producing knowledge, via the link between the first contribution and the level of contribution reached. While most studies look at the career of contribution after the first contribution, we focus on what happened before and during the first contribution. We challenge the fact that becoming a core member starts with peripheral contributive activities and results from a continuous learning process, as explained by the theory of community of practice. On the contrary, and coherent with epistemic community theory, our results, based on 13,000 answers to a survey on the use and contributions to Wikipedia, show that the future level of users' involvement depends on the time between the discovery of Wikipedia and the first contribution (negatively), and of the effort made in the first contribution (positively). Implications for management are also discussed.

From a representative survey of 2,000 French individuals, we study whether consumption of music through streaming services, such as Spotify or YouTube, is a substitute or a complement to other music consumption modes such as CD, pay-downloads or live music. Controlling for the taste for music, various socio-demographic characteristics, as well as for the usual determinants of music consumption either offline (radio, TV, friends/relatives) or online (online recommendations, social networks), our results show that consuming music as streams (where the consumer does not possess the music but has just an access to it) has no significant effect on CDs purchase but is a complement to buying music online. The use of streaming services also affects positively live music attendance, but only for national or international artists who are more likely to be available on streaming services. These results suggest that a new music ecosystem is emerging in which the “possession” as well as the “access” modes of recorded music consumption might coexist.

This article aims to examine how the size of P2P file-sharing communities affects their functioning and performance (i.e. their capacity to share and distribute content). Olson (1965) argued that small communities are more able to provide collective goods. Using an original database on BitTorrent file-sharing communities, our article finds a positive relation between the size of a community and the amount of collective good provided ; However, the individual propensity to cooperate decreases with community size. These two features seem to indicate that P2P file-sharing communities provide a pure (non rival) public good. We also show that specialized communities are more efficient than general communities to encourage cooperative behavior. Finally, the rules designed by the administrators of these communities play an active role to stimulate voluntary contributions and improve the self-sustainability of file-sharing.