Post by Sapphire Capital on Oct 15, 2013 0:51:26 GMT 4
Innovation and the Financial Guillotine
Ramana Nanda
Harvard University - Entrepreneurial Management Unit
Matthew Rhodes-Kropf
Harvard Business School - Entrepreneurial Management Unit; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
August 2013
NBER Working Paper No. w19379
Abstract:
Our paper demonstrates that while failure tolerance by investors may encourage potential entrepreneurs to innovate, financiers with investment strategies that tolerate early failure endogenously choose to fund less radical innovations. Failure tolerance as an equilibrium price that increases in the level of experimentation. More experimental projects that don't generate enough to pay the price cannot be started. In equilibrium all competing financiers may choose to offer failure tolerant contracts to attract entrepreneurs, leaving no capital to fund the most radical, experimental projects. The tradeoff between failure tolerance and a sharp guillotine helps explain when and where radical innovation occurs.
source: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2318282