Failing firms and successful entrepreneurs--论文代写范文精选

大多数公司仍是失败的,在创业学者和实践者中似乎是一个共识,即使他们不同意实际比例。在这种情况下,经济学家驳斥了商学院项目的不合时宜的调查研究。这样一个零假设引出了一个问题,为什么任何企业家选择创业。下面的essay代写范文进行详述。

ABSTRACT 
A detailed review of four literatures, namely, (1) Industrial organization, (2) Population ecology, (3) Labor and micro economics, and (4) Entrepreneurship, suggests that entrepreneurial performance is almost always confounded with firm performance. Serial entrepreneurial experience is at best seen as one of the inputs into firm performance. In this paper we argue for an instrumental view of the firm by formally showing that entrepreneurs can amplify their expected success rates (as compared to firm success rates) by exploiting contagion processes embedded in serial entrepreneurship. The advantages to holding concurrent portfolios that exploit heterogeneity are well known. The same advantages may be achieved in the serial context through contagion. Our model exploits an observation due to William Feller on the near equivalence of the two, statistically speaking. It also leads to empirically sound implications about the size distribution of firms in the economy and suggests more nuanced approaches toward future research. For example, both failed firms and successful ones entail useful learning effects and path dependencies in the careers of serial entrepreneurs.

Introduction 
“Most firms fail,” appears to be a consensus among entrepreneurship scholars and practitioners alike, even when they disagree on the actual proportions (Aldrich and Martinez 2001; Fichman and Levinthal 1991; Hannan and Freeman 1984; Low and MacMillan 1988; Stinchcombe 1965). Estimates of firm success rates range from the highly disputed but optimistic 44% of Kirchhoff (1997) to the widely acknowledged one in ten of the National Venture Capitalists Association. 

Under these circumstances, economists such as Arrow are not easily refuted in their claims about the irrelevancy of business school programs that profess to “teach” entrepreneurship 1 : Are we trying to isolate a claim that some particular set of individuals with certain characteristics or particular set of institutions create -- distinguish the successes and the failures? And this introduces me to what I call the null hypothesis: That there is no such thing. Such a null hypothesis begs the question as to why any entrepreneur would ever start a firm, to say nothing of the serial entrepreneur who starts several, both before and after successes and failures. To that the economist normally replies either that the entrepreneur is extraordinarily risk loving, or that he or she operates under the illusion that the expected value of the payoff is high enough to spur entry – or both. 

There is credible empirical evidence that the former explanation based on a supra-normal preference for risk, cannot be justified. Entrepreneurs have been shown to range all over the risk preference spectrum and the distribution may even be skewed toward risk aversion rather than otherwise (Brockhaus 1980; Palich and Bagby 1995; Sarasvathy, Simon and Lave 1997). Recent meta-analytic studies of the risk preference literature also contradict each other (Stewart and Roth 2001; Miner and Raju 2004). As for the latter claim that the expected payoff is high enough to spur entry, there are no studies on how the entrepreneur estimates his or her subjective probability of success or failure. 

Nor are there any studies that indicate how they ought to estimate such a probability. Instead, the overall practice of the extensive literature on estimating rates of firm success/failure is to unwittingly or explicitly equate the expected success rate of firms with the expected success rate of entrepreneurs. 4 This leads us to the central question of this paper: Given what we think we know about firm success and failure, namely that most firms fail, can we say anything about the possible success or failure of entrepreneurs? 

In the following pages we argue that irrespective of what we might believe the failure rate of firms to be, we can still rigorously understand important relationships between entrepreneurial success and failure and derive useful prescriptions to improve the success rates of entrepreneurs. We begin our investigation by reviewing four streams of literature to summarize what we know about entrepreneurial success: (1) Industrial organization; (2) Population ecology; (3) Labor and micro economics; and, (4) Entrepreneurship. We then formally demonstrate the efficacy of serial entrepreneurship by modeling it as a contagion process. The process relates two sample spaces, one involving entrepreneurs (E-space) and the other involving firms (F-space). 

The probabilities of entrepreneurial success are then expressed in terms of the probabilities of firm success; and bounds for the amplification factor (due to seriality) are derived. While the models are quite elementary and use off-the-shelf results from the theory of Polya Urns and correlated Bernoulli walks, even at this basic level they offer two interesting insights. The first builds upon William Feller’s robust observation that heterogeneity and contagion may both produce the same sort of statistical effects. In financial economics and related literature on risk management, the advantages of heterogeneity are very well known in theories involving portfolio diversification. 

Feller’s observation, which we demonstrate through an example, suggests that the same advantages may be achieved through the use of a contagion process. Serial entrepreneurship, modeled as a temporal portfolio, attempts to set up such a process. The second insight consists in an empirically testable implication for a population of serial entrepreneurs, namely, that the distribution of the proportion of expected number of entrepreneurs who have started i successful firms in a time period T follows the negative binomial. As is well known, the negative binomial distribution is associated with Gibrat’s law, which in turn is central to studies of size distributions of firms in the economy such as Simon (1955), and Ijiri and Simon (1975).

What We Know About Entrepreneurial Success/Failure 
Success rates of firms and entrepreneurs have been studied extensively by a variety of researchers under a number of rubrics such as: firm formation and entry (by scholars in industrial organization); organizational founding and survival (by population ecologists and organizational theorists); and, entrepreneurial success and failure (by entrepreneurship researchers). We now examine each of these areas and summarize their findings to show that all of them either confound the spaces of entrepreneurs and firms, or focus exclusively on the space of firms.

From Studies of Industrial Organization 
Following a plea by Edwin Mansfield (1962, p. 1023), to encourage econometric studies of the birth, growth, and death of firms, a slew of industrial organization scholars began studying the process of entry with a view to understanding its determinants as well as its impact on market performance. In an excellent review of this stream of research, Geroski (1995) summarizes the results as a series of stylized facts that are generally agreed upon by scholars in the area. For our particular purposes in this paper, the key facts from this body of work are: (a) While entry is common, survival is not. In other words, while large numbers of firms enter most markets in most years, survival of new entrants, especially de novo entrants, is low; and, (b) Most markets are subject to enormous waves or bursts of entry in the early stages of their life cycles.（essay代写)

51Due网站原创范文除特殊说明外一切图文著作权归51Due所有；未经51Due官方授权谢绝任何用途转载或刊发于媒体。如发生侵犯著作权现象，51Due保留一切法律追诉权。
更多essay代写范文欢迎访问我们主页 www.51due.com 当然有essay代写需求可以和我们24小时在线客服 QQ:800020041 联系交流。-X（essay代写)