The nonpecuniary benefits of managing a small business are a first order consideration for many nascent entrepreneurs, yet the preference for business ownership is mostly ignored in models of entrepreneurship and occupational choice. In this paper, we study a population with varying...

Murray Rothbard developed the concept of decision-making rent as a return to a kind of unhirable labor performed by the entrepreneur in his role as owner and ultimate decision-maker of the firm. Rothbard conceived owner's rent as separate from profit and loss and the decision-making function as...

In this article I make three main arguments. First, the appropriate governance choice for firms is one that reflects the tradeoff between market failure and relational failure or, in other words, between knowledge appropriability and knowledge accessibility. Second, through what may be...

In this paper we investigate the ways in which new forms of organization enabled by digital technologies such as crowdsourcing and digital marketplaces are allowing firms to circumvent and defy traditional knowledge constraints. This is part of the broader question of when and why these forms of...

We provide empirical evidence that uncertainty (rather than risk) and optimism are distinctive characteristics of high-impact entrepreneurial firms (recently listed firms) relative to old, incumbent firms. Based on this evidence, we construct an entrepreneurial entry predation model with...

What is driving the declining quality of innovation-driven entrepreneurship? In this paper, we argue the growing entrepreneurship industry is an important yet overlooked explanation. This rapidly growing industry has transformed the nature of entrepreneurship and encouraged a particular form of...

In his Man, Economy, and State, Murray Rothbard introduces the catallactic function of decision-making owner, and the correspondent income of decision-making ability rent. These are supposed to exist both in ERE (they are, therefore, distinct from the capitalist function and his income, from...

Personal strategies of owners/founders of small business startups are related to performance and to environmental uncertainty. This is done using a longitudinal data set of some 50 Dutch startups. The results suggest a dynamic process between strategy and performance.A discrimination is made...

This article formalises the idea of money-metric production frontiers, which we propose as a general framework for nonparametric evaluation of economic efficiency. As we show in our methodological discussion, this improves the flexibility and economic interpretation of our model. The empirical...