Excess entry refers to the high failure rate of new entrepreneurial ventures. Economic explanations suggest 'hit and run' entrants and risk-seeking behavior. A psychological explanation is that people (entrepreneurs) are overconfident in their abilities (Camerer & Lovallo, 1999). Characterizing...

The pervasiveness of the entrepreneurial phenomenon attracts the attention on the determinants of the decision of becoming entrepreneur. As the entrepreneurial decision can be additionally conceived as firm entry, as a real business investment in the creation of a new business and as a career...

Recent empirical evidence about innovation shows that established firms rarely invest in radical innovation but incrementally improve the existing technology. Revolutionary breakthroughs are more likely to be introduced by new entrants. These stylized facts motivate a renewed attention of the...

The pervasiveness of the entrepreneurial phenomenon attracts the attention on the determinants of the decision of becoming entrepreneur. As the entrepreneurial decision can be additionally conceived as firm entry, as a real business investment in the creation of a new business and as a career...

A stylized fact shows that firms rarely seek for radical breakthroughs and more frequently invest in small improvements of the existing technology. This paper proposes a model that compares firms’ value when firms can invest in strategies implying different degrees of innovativeness. The model...

Technological refinements appears to be much more frequent than breakthrough innovations. We argue that this could be the result of an optimizing choice when the innovation revenues are exposed to Knightian uncertainty and innovators are loss-averse. The innovator's choice between breakthrough...

In dealing with peer punishment as a cooperation enforcement device, laboratory studies have typically concentrated on discretionary sanctioning, allowing players to castigate each other arbitrarily. By contrast, in real life punishments are often meted out only insofar as punishers are entitled...

Creativity is a complex and multi-dimensional phenomenon that has hardly been considered byeconomists, despite a great deal of economic importance. This paper presents a series ofexperiments where subjects face creativity tasks where, in one case, ex-ante goals and constraintsare imposed on...