Reciprocity in financial decision making: intuitive and analytical mind-reading strategies

In financial games requiring to take into account the reciprocal benefits, mind-reading—that is, trying to identify other people’s thoughts—is involved. Mind-reading may occur through either analytical or intuitive strategies. Two studies were carried out to deepen the role of analytical and intuitive modes of thinking in mind-reading in financial decision making. Employing the Ultimatum Game as a setting suitable for researching into these topics, we found that the sums of money offered by undergraduates were modulated depending both on the psychological portraits of the responders and on the two modes of thinking. Specifically we found that the sums of money the undergraduates offered varied consistently across the two studies according to specific responder’s psychological features such as honesty, sense of justice, personal dignity. As for the two modes of thinking, it turned out that in the intuitive task proposers offered larger amount of money than in the analytical task.     

A higher-order model of community resilience potential: development and assessment through confirmatory composite analysis based on partial least squares

Quality & Quantity - The topic of community resilience attracts as much academic research as it does social media. Understanding the drivers of change and community adaptation in the face of...     

Beyond the “ivory tower”. Comparing academic and non-academic knowledge on social entrepreneurship

The increasing relevance of societal challenges has recently brought social entrepreneurship to the fore due to its capacity to leverage entrepreneurial processes to achieve social value while ensuring profits. In this study, we apply an experimental research method to analyse the concept of social entrepreneurship comprehensively. More specifically, we develop bibliometric analysis and web crawling techniques to gather information related to social entrepreneurship from Scopus and Wikipedia. We conduct a comparative network analysis of social entrepreneurship’s conceptual structure at academic and non-academic levels. This analysis has been performed considering scientific articles’ keywords and Wikipedia webpages’ co-occurrences, enabling us to identify four different thematic clusters in both cases. Moreover, plotting the centrality and density of each cluster on a bi-dimensional matrix, we have sketched a strategic diagram and provided the thematic evolution of this research topic, based on the level of interaction among clusters, and the degree of cohesion of keywords in each cluster. This paper represents one of the first attempts in the entrepreneurship literature to shed light on the conceptual boundaries of a research topic based on the analysis of both a scientific and an open-source knowledge database. Our results reveal similarities and discrepancies between those two different sources of knowledge, and outline avenues for future studies at the intersection between social entrepreneurship and the research domains of digital transformation, performance measurement, entrepreneurial ecosystems, and ethics. We also call for a further conceptualisation of social entrepreneurship in the face of the increasing complexity that characterises grand challenges.

     

Distributional Issues in Natural Capital Accounting: An Application to Land Ownership and Ecosystem Services in Scotland

Environmental and Resource Economics - Accounting for ecosystems is increasingly central to natural capital accounting. What is missing from this, however, is an answer to questions about how...     

Effective entrepreneurial narrative design in reward crowdfunding campaigns for social ventures

One of the most important challenges for social venture entrepreneurs is acquiring resources. Reward crowdfunding is considered a suitable tool for meeting the financing needs of social ventures, whose backers are particularly interested in firm ideas and core values rather than in collaterals or business plans. A strategic factor that is able to influence the outcome of crowdfunding campaigns is the entrepreneurial narrative. Very few scholars have examined the key factors that support a crowdfunding campaign, particularly those on reward-based crowdfunding platforms, and the effects of entrepreneurial narratives on investors’ decisions. Aiming to fill this research gap, this paper investigates how entrepreneurs in the technology industry describe their social ventures and projects on Eppela, an Italian reward-based crowdfunding platform. Thematic analysis was applied to detect the five following key factors of effective entrepreneurial narratives in reward-based crowdfunding campaigns for social ventures: 1) problem/need; 2) project; 3) product; 4) team; and 5) venture. Each key factor includes specific subfactors. Lexical data analysis was then performed to identify the following expected effects of the examined entrepreneurial narratives on potential investors, leading these investors to understand, trust, and approve the project proposal, and thus, finance the social venture’s project: 1) reassurance, 2) reliability, and 3) credibility. Based on these results, this study proposes an explanatory model about how to design effective entrepreneurial narratives to be presented to contribute as much as possible to the success of projects in crowdfunding platforms.

     

Challenges to open innovation in traditional SMEs: an analysis of pre-competitive projects in university-industry-government collaboration

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal - Governments are increasingly focusing their efforts on stimulating innovation within small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). As a result,...