Back to the familiar? How attention and rare experiences overcome local search in external technology sourcing.

Working Papers

In this paper, we develop and test a theoretical framework that considers how established firms forming partnerships with startups may be subject to spatial and temporal myopia and how these tendencies are moderated by the established firms’ histories of experiencing essential failures and successes in solving R&D problems. Read More

Artificial Intelligence, Lean Method and Startup Product Innovation

Funded Research Proposal

As startups are at the forefront of adopting AI tools, it is important to understand whether AI can amplify the effects of lean methods in helping startups to be even more responsive to market conditions that before. And if so, to what extent and under what conditions AI can complement lean method in developing products.Read More

Organizing Knowledge Production Teams Within Firms for Innovation

Published Research

How should firms organize their pool of inventive human capital for firm-level innovation? Although access to diverse knowledge may aid knowledge recombination, which can facilitate innovation, prior literature has focused primarily on one way of achieving that: diversity of inventor-held knowledge within a given knowledge production team. Read More

Personal Wealth and Self-Employment

Working Papers

We examine how wealth windfalls affect self-employment decisions using data on cash payments from claims on Texas shale drilling to people throughout the United States. Individuals who receive large wealth shocks (greater than $50,000) have 51% higher self-employment rates.Read More

Entrepreneur’s Knowledge, Firm Survival, and the Normalized Burn Rate

Working Papers

We study the association of spending per employee with startup firm survival. Our theory model posits that entrepreneur’s knowledge defines the complex decision process of combining human and non-human inputs to increase firm value. Read More

Inequality Aversion When the Reward is Scarce: The Case of Salary vs. Equity Compensation

Working Papers

Do workers have different equality preferences depending on the type of payoff? In many firms, the distribution of equity compensation is more equal than the distribution of salary. We design an experimental group production game to examine how workers respond to combinations of different distributions of equity and salary.Read More

Social Is the New Financial: How Startup Social Media Activity Influences Funding Outcomes

Working Papers

In this project, we explore the impact of startup firms’ social media activities on their entrepreneurial financing performance. Social media can mitigate information problems in entrepreneurial financing in two ways.Read More

How a Startup’s ‘Burn Rate’ Influences Its Success

A critical factor that determines whether a startup succeeds or fails is its level of spending, or burn rate. Research from professors Ron Berman and Pablo Hernandez-Lagos examines how an entrepreneur’s education and experience levels can predict a startup’s burn rate, and thus its odds of success.Read More