Drawing from social network theory, scholars have identified two ways in which social ties influence venture capital investment decisions: directly through personal ties and indirectly through status hierarchies. Previous research has examined these effects independently. Our study is the first...

Prior work in business experimentation concludes that involving other stakeholders besides the entrepreneur mitigates the challenge of biased experimental decision-making. However, this work also maintains a key simplifying assumption—that the actors involved have a common goal to maximize...