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We provide an empirical analysis of pool hopping behavior among 15 mining pools throughout Bitcoin's history. Mining pools have emerged as major players to ensure that the Bitcoin system stays secure, valid, and stable. Individual miners join mining pools to benefit from a more predictable income.Many questions remain open regarding how mining pools have evolved throughout Bitcoin's history and when and why miners join or leave mining pools. We propose a heuristic algorithm to extract the payout flow from mining pools and detect the pools' migration of miners. Our results showed that payout schemes and pool fees influence miners' decisions to join, change, or exit from a mining pool, thus affecting the dynamics of mining pool market shares. Our analysis provides evidence that mining activity becomes an industry as miners' decisions follow classical economic rationale.

IntroductionThe diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICTs), because of their impact on growth and firms' productivity, has generated much literature. One important result of this literature is that ICT diffusion across agents and particularly across firms is uneven. Recent empirical studies in various fields show that, among the factors that explain such variations in firms' rates of ICT adoption, and which are related mainly to their internal characteristics and/or to the characteristics of their external environment, (1) the location of firms play a critical role. Nevertheless, while most of these studies emphasise the spatial dimension, its conceptualisation is rather poor, and is often limited to the location of firms' headquarters. Another gap in this literature is the study of intrafirm diffusion of ICT. Indeed, once the technology is adopted, it is used more or less intensively within firms. Some recent papers dealing with this issue develop new approaches to model the decision about how much to invest as part of an intrafirm diffusion process (Battisti and Stoneman, 2003;2005;Battisti et al, 2009), but do not take into account the influence of geography.This paper aims to investigate, at the intersection of these two groups of studies, the influence of the geography of firms on ICT diffusion within firms. In our approach the geography of the firm is multifaceted, in relation to the characteristics of its location area(s) and to its spatial organisation at a national scale. (2)

In this paper, we investigate the role of social media as a source of information for recruiters to discriminate applicants. We set up a field experiment over a 12‐month period, involving more than 800 applications from two fictitious applicants which differed in their perceived origins, which is an information available only from their Facebook profiles. During the experiment, an unexpected change in the Facebook layout reduced the salience of the information available on social media profiles. Before this change, a significant 41.7% gap between the two applicants callback rates highlights that personal online profiles are used by recruiters as a source of information to discriminate against applicants of foreign origin. After the layout change that mitigates our signal, the difference in callback rates fades away. This result suggests that the screening conducted by the employers does not go beyond the main pages of profiles. It also illustrates that design choices made by online platforms may have important consequences on the extent of discrimination.