Novel early stage ideas face uncertainty on the expertise needed to elaborate them, which creates a need to circulate them widely to find a match. Yet as information is not excludable, shared ideas may be stolen, reducing incentives to innovate. Still, in idea-rich environments inventors may...

We examine the effect of trust on financial investment and contracting decisions in a micro-economic environment where trust is exogenous. Using hand-collected data on European venture capital, we show that the Eurobarometer measure of trust among nations significantly affects investment...

This paper examines the division of founder shares in entrepreneurial ventures, focusing on the decision of whether or not to divide the shares equally among all founders. To motivate the empirical analysis we develop a simple theory of costly bargaining, where founders trade off the simplicity...

Novel early stage ideas face uncertainty on the expertise needed to elaborate them, which creates a need to circulate them widely to find a match. Yet as information is not excludable, shared ideas may be stolen, reducing incentives to innovate. Still, in idea-rich environments inventors may...

The initial attempt at promoting venture capital (VC) in Germany was a massive failure.The history of the first German VC fund, the Deutsche Wagnisfinanzierungsgesellschaft (WFG), provides researchers with a means of studying the factors that impact VC success or failure.Many factors contributed...

This paper examines how employees trade off planned activities versus unplanned innovation, and how firms can choose incentives to affect these choices. It develops a multi-task model where employees makes choices between their assigned standard tasks, for which the firm has a performance...

This paper develops a theory of how angel and venture capital markets interact. Entrepreneurs first receive angel then venture capital funding. The two investor types are 'friends' in that they rely upon each other's investments. However, they are also 'foes', because at the later stage the...

This paper examines the process of how entrepreneurs assemble resources. In the model, the entrepreneur's challenge is to convince two complementary resource providers to commit their resources to a new venture. Before committing their resources, one of them needs to perform a costly evaluation....

In recent years universities have been taken by a new wave of entrepreneurial activities. Originally universities engaged with entrepreneurship mostly in terms of commercializing innovations based on research in the sciences. The new initiatives are instead focused on students and recent alumni,...

This paper analyzes the decision of growing startups to either scale up on their own or to sell to an established company. The model recognizes the intergenerational linkages that acquirers were startups themselves in the past who chose not to get acquired. The acquisition price depends on the...