Entrepreneurial Management
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- April 8, 2024
- Article
Loyalty Programs May Limit Competition, and They Could Be Pushing Prices up for Everyone
By: Alexandru Nichifor and Scott Duke Kominers- April 8, 2024
- Article
Loyalty Programs May Limit Competition, and They Could Be Pushing Prices up for Everyone
By: Alexandru Nichifor and Scott Duke Kominers -
- April 2024
- Case
The Engine
By: Joshua Lev Krieger, Jim Matheson, Fiona Murray and Nicholas Christman- April 2024
- Case
The Engine
By: Joshua Lev Krieger, Jim Matheson, Fiona Murray and Nicholas Christman
About the Unit
The Entrepreneurial Management Unit strives to raise the level of academic work in the field of entrepreneurship, in methodological rigor, conceptual depth, and managerial applicability. We also strive to improve the odds of entrepreneurial success for our students and for practitioners worldwide.
Because it is such a complex phenomenon, entrepreneurship must be studied through multiple lenses. We use three.
- The process of entrepreneurship - We seek to understand the processes of entrepreneurial activity in start-ups and established firms by examining the antecedents and consequences of various forms of entrepreneurial opportunity identification and opportunity pursuit for individuals, organizations, and industries. We see experimentation and innovation in products, services, processes, and business models as central to entrepreneurial activity.
- The finance of entrepreneurship - We seek to understand the financing of entrepreneurial ventures by studying the antecedents and consequences of entrepreneurial funding decisions both domestically and internationally.
- The context of entrepreneurship - We seek to understand the ways in which entrepreneurs both respond to and shape the context in which they operate, by examining the history of entrepreneurship across time and national borders and by analyzing the legal and cultural contexts for managerial action.
Please also visit the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship.
Recent Publications
Spotify Lyrics: Free or Paid?
- April 2024 |
- Case |
- Faculty Research
Loyalty Programs May Limit Competition, and They Could Be Pushing Prices up for Everyone
By: Alexandru Nichifor and Scott Duke Kominers
- April 8, 2024 |
- Article |
- The Conversation
The Engine
By: Joshua Lev Krieger, Jim Matheson, Fiona Murray and Nicholas Christman
- April 2024 |
- Case |
- Faculty Research
LinkedIn: Project InVersion
- April 2024 |
- Case |
- Faculty Research
The Effects of Medical Debt Relief: Evidence from Two Randomized Experiments
By: Raymond Kluender, Neale Mahoney, Francis Wong and Wesley Yin
- 2024 |
- Working Paper |
- Faculty Research
Two in five Americans have medical debt, nearly half of whom owe at least $2,500. Concerned by this burden, governments and private donors have undertaken large, high-profile efforts to relieve medical debt. We partnered with RIP Medical Debt to conduct two randomized experiments that relieved medical debt with a face value of $169 million for 83,401 people between 2018 and 2020. We track outcomes using credit reports, collections account data, and a multimodal survey. There are three sets of results. First, we find no impact of debt relief on credit access, utilization, and financial distress on average. Second, we estimate that debt relief causes a moderate but statistically significant reduction in payment of existing medical bills. Third, we find no effect of medical debt relief on mental health on average, with detrimental effects for some groups in pre-registered heterogeneity analysis.
Pay-As-You-Go Insurance: Experimental Evidence on Consumer Demand and Behavior
By: Raymond Kluender
- April 2024 |
- Article |
- Review of Financial Studies
Pay-as-you-go contracts reduce minimum purchase requirements which may increase market participation. We randomize the introduction and price(s) of a novel pay-as-you-go contract to the California auto insurance market where 17 percent of drivers are uninsured. The pay-as-you-go contract increases take-up by 10.8 p.p (89%) and days with coverage by 4.6 days over the three-month experiment (27%). Demand is relatively inelastic and pay-as-you-go increases insurance coverage in part by relaxing liquidity requirements: most drivers’ purchasing behavior is consistent with a cost of credit in excess of payday lending rates and 19 percent of drivers have a purchase rejected for insufficient funds.
Decision Authority and the Returns to Algorithms
By: Hyunjin Kim, Edward L. Glaeser, Andrew Hillis, Scott Duke Kominers and Michael Luca
- April 2024 |
- Article |
- Strategic Management Journal
We evaluate a pilot in an Inspections Department to explore the returns to a pair of algorithms that varied in their sophistication. We find that both algorithms provided substantial prediction gains, suggesting that even simple data may be helpful. However, these gains did not result in improved decisions. Inspectors often used their decision authority to override algorithmic recommendations, partly to consider other organizational objectives without improving outcomes. Interviews with 55 departments find that while some ran pilots seeking to prioritize inspections using data, all provided considerable decision authority to inspectors. These findings suggest that for algorithms to improve managerial decisions, organizations must consider both the returns to algorithms in the context and how decision authority is managed.
Angel City Football Club: Scoring a New Model
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Jennifer Fonstad and Nicole Tempest Keller
- March 2024 |
- Case |
- Faculty Research
In January 2024, Kara Nortman, Julie Uhrman, and Natalie Portman, the founders of Angel City Football Club (ACFC) were developing the club’s first three-year strategic plan. Founded in 2020, ACFC had a star-studded investor group, including Portman and celebrities such as Eva Longoria, Jennifer Garner, Billie Jean King, and 13 former players from the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team (USWNT). As outsiders to professional sports, the all-female founding team had rewritten the playbook for how to build a sports franchise by applying lessons from the tech and entertainment industries. They had harnessed digital platforms to establish and cultivate a global brand. Unlike typical sports franchises that built their teams and track records over many years before extending their brand beyond a local base, Angel City had inverted the model, generating as much global as local interest in the club within the first three years. ACFC’s success was reflected in its estimated private market valuation of $180 million, the highest in the league. But perhaps equally important to ACFC, the club had made a positive impact on its local community and had started to bend the curve toward greater pay equity in women’s sports—the club’s ultimate goal. The founders knew there was much more to do to capitalize on the club’s momentum. There were opportunities to build the brand further globally and to build out fan engagement and membership in the mobile app, but these would require investments in digital content and production, CRM systems, and e-commerce. There were also opportunities to build the “on-field product” (team and facilities) that would demand budget allocation to training facilities, the field, coaching staff, and medical rehabilitation facilities and staff. The founders weighed the most effective ways to build value for the franchise. Was it better to allocate the incremental budget dollar to investments in digital brand building or to investments in the on-field product?
Harvard Business Publishing
Seminars & Conferences
- 01 May 2024
Jonathan Kolstad, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley
Entrepreneurial Management Seminar