Modeling the Economic Returns to Entrepreneurial Behavior: Theory and Applications

Recently, management scholars have highlighted the relative ineffectiveness of isolating mechanisms to sustain competitive advantage in today's complex business environment. Instead, they have argued that firms need to take an entrepreneurial approach to strategy constantly searching for new profit opportunities and updating their sources of competitive advantage. The aim of this book is to provide a framework for evaluating the returns to entrepreneurial behavior. Several characteristics of entrepreneurial returns pose significant challenges for developing this framework. In particular, entrepreneurial returns are ex ante uncertain, driven by unique and complex behavior, and temporary. This work utilizes economic theory, simulation tools (system dynamics modeling and agent-based simulation modeling) as well as concepts from community ecology to explore the dynamics of the entrepreneurial process and to capture the returns to various entrepreneurial behaviors. This book should be useful to business scholars, as well as business managers, venture capitalists and policy makers interested in improving the entrepreneurial performance of their businesses or business environments.