This paper explores a new role for venture capitalists, as knowledge intermediaries. A venture capital investor can communicate valuable knowledge to an entrepreneur, facilitating innovation. The venture capitalist can also communicate the entrepreneur's innovative knowledge to other portfolio...

Merchant guilds have been portrayed as "social networks" that generated beneficial "social capital" by sustaining shared norms, effectively transmitting information, and successfully undertaking collective action. This social capital, it is claimed, benefited society as a whole by enabling...

The available evidence from numerous studies suggests that overconfidence is a more important phenomenon in North America than in Japan. The pattern is reversed for shame, which appears to play a more important role among Japanese than North Americans. We develop a model that endogenizes these...