Co-authored with Stephen Leider and Ozge Sahin.
In this paper we look at how people make dynamic (sequential) decisions. We examine decision-making in a range of dynamic problems and find, unsurprisingly, that most people are not ‘forward-looking optimizers’. Rather, decision rules depend on the type of environment: decision rules are quite simple in stopping (secretary) problems and quite sophisticated in other dynamic problems. Read more
Co-authored with Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, David Brophy, Thomas Jensen and Melanie Milovac.
In this report (commissioned by the Kauffman foundation) we look at how entrepreneurial accelerators and incubators organize their mentoring initiatives. We distill some of the best practices and discuss the differences between university and non-university accelerators, and the lessons learned for setting up such programs. Read more
Co-authored with Kyle Hyndman and Anyan Qi.
In this research we study how entrepreneurs and investors divide equity. We use the Nash bargaining framework and test several predictions in the lab. We find that the number of investors matters less than the contract form. Preferred Stock contracts, which are popular in practice, disadvantage the entrepreneur and lead to more aggressive investor bargaining tactics. Read more
Co-authored with Maqbool Dada and Brett Hathaway.
Chatbot technology can help service firms reduce staffing needs and achieve cost savings. In this paper we use online experiments to examine how people respond to chatbots. We examine when and why chatbots are underutilized and propose a simple nudge to increase chatbot adoption: providing information about the time savings for the customer. Read more
Co-authored with Tobias Lieberum and Sebastian Schiffels.
In this paper we examine how agile development principles (iterative sprints, autonomy) affect innovation performance. We find that Agile mainly helps low performance by creating a sense of urgency; however for more complex task it can lead to short term thinking and harm performance. Read more
Image Sources: Medium.com/startupgrind, ScienceMag