Although economic theory has emphasized that moral hazard and hold-up problems influence the design of contracts, very little is known about the process by which explicit contracts are established and the effect of contractual arrangements on firm performance. This paper attempts to demonstrate...

Research on the creation of new high-technology companies has typically focused either on industry-level factors such as market structure and technology regime or on individual-level factors such as the work experience of entrepreneurs. This study complements these approaches by examining the...

At least since Schumpeter (1934 and 1942), researchers have been interested in identifying the dimensions of technology regimes that facilitate new firm formation as a mode of technology exploitation. Using data on 1,397 patents assigned to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the...

Technology licensing officers play an important role in the creation of university spinoffs. Anecdotal data suggests that licensing officers make use of the representativeness heuristic when deciding which inventors’ technologies should (not) be commercialized through the founding of new...