Visual analytics on CEO profile images in Initial Coin Offerings (ICO)

Description

Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) allow companies to raise funds by issuing digital tokens to investors. These campaigns take place online, with ventures typically sharing limited documentation through their campaign pages.

Although ICOs have drawn considerable interest from entrepreneurs, investors, and regulators alike, our understanding of how they unfold remains limited.

The characteristics of a CEO can significantly shape how an organisation is run and how funding decisions are made. This project examines the visual presentation of CEOs, particularly through their images, as a channel of communication in digital crowdfunding settings. Specifically, it looks at CEOs of ventures listed on ICO campaign platforms seeking to attract investment.

Research overview

This research explores how investors perceive CEO characteristics through visual cues presented on ICO campaign pages, and whether these visual signals influence investment decisions in alternative finance markets. By extracting and interpreting visual features from CEO images, the project aims to build a deeper understanding of how leadership is conveyed and perceived in digital crowdfunding contexts. To achieve this, the project focuses on three core goals: developing effective methods for extracting and interpreting visual features that represent CEO traits within the ICO campaign setting, examining how these visual features relate to investor decision-making, and improving the accuracy of predicting ICO campaign success by incorporating these relationships into predictive models.

Key findings

The results revealed a clear positive relationship between how confident an ICO team appears in their images and the amount of capital they raised. Importantly, this effect held even after accounting for other visual traits such as attractiveness and intelligence, suggesting that confidence carries its own distinct signal for investors. Further analysis of specific visual elements showed that teams whose members smiled more, wore suits, and used black-and-white profile images tended to be perceived as more confident. These findings were robust across multiple estimation methods and instrumental variable approaches addressing potential endogeneity concerns. Overall, the study provides evidence that visual cues in photographs serve as a meaningful communication channel in digital fundraising environments where information is scarce and uncertainty is high.

Publications and outputs

Journal article

• Huang, W., Vismara, S. and Wei, X., 2022. Confidence and capital raising. Journal of Corporate Finance, 77, p.101900.

Blog post

• Revolutionising financial decision-making with emerging technologies and interdisciplinary approaches, Research and Innovation Blog

Contact

Dr Xingjie Wei

This project was funded by Leeds University Business School’s Small Research Grant.