We study the role of diversity and performance in the entrepreneurial teams. We exploit a unique dataset of MBA students who participated in a required course to propose and start a real micro-business that allows us to examine horizontal diversity (i.e., within the team) as well as vertical...

We explore the role of founding teams in accounting for the post-entry dynamics of startups. While the entrepreneurship literature has largely focused on business founders, we broaden this view by considering founding teams as both the founders and early joiners. We investigate the idea that the...

This paper estimates social effects of incentivizing people in teams. In two field experiments featuring exogenous team formation and opportunities for repeated social interactions, we find large team effects that operate through social channels. The team compensation system induced agents to...

An analysis of a large panel data set on Israeli industrial firms finds that most of the growth in aggregate productivity comes from productivity changes within firms rather than from entry, exit, or differential growth; that firms which will exit in the future have lower productivity...

We study the processes of firm growth in the evolution of the Japanese cotton spinning industry during 1883-1914 by integrating strategy and historical approaches and utilizing rich quantitative firm-level data and detailed business histories. The resultant conceptual model highlights growth...

Both private and public organizations constantly grapple with incentive schemes to induce maximum effort from agents. We begin with a theoretical exploration of optimal contest design, focusing on the number of competitors. Our theory reveals a critical link between the distribution of luck and...

We conduct a real-effort experiment where participants choose between individual compensation and team-based pay. In contrast to tournaments, which are often avoided by women, we find that women choose team-based pay at least as frequently as men in all our treatments and conditions, and...

We conduct a novel lab experiment in which pairs of subjects make separable decisions about allocative efficiency and equity in different agency structures. In terms of equity, subjects appropriate all surplus when they can, and share equally when they have to negotiate. They achieve high...

Recent work linking the adoption of key organizational practices to productivity raises an important question: if adoption increases productivity so dramatically, why does adoption across an industry take so long? This paper explores this question in the context of one particularly interesting...