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Externe Veröffentlichungen | 2015 Effort provision in entrepreneurial teams: effects of team size, free-riding and peer pressure

This paper analyzes whether effort provision in entrepreneurial teams

depends on the size of the team, assuming that size determines the

strength of free-riding and peer pressure effects in entrepreneurial

teams. We provide a theoretical model and empirical analyses to explain

the joint effect of free-riding and peer pressure on effort in start-up

teams. We begin with an economic model by Kandel and Lazear in J Polit

Econ 100(4):801–817, (1992) and enrich it using insights from

entrepreneurship research. Based on our model, we first hypothesize that

with increasing team size in entrepreneurial teams, the efforts of the

individual team founders should follow an inverted U-shaped pattern.

Second, we argue that the peer pressure effect is stronger if team

members have stronger social ties, and thus we expect the

effort-maximizing team size to be larger in teams with stronger social

ties. Using a data set from 214 German start-up teams, we find that our

hypotheses are supported by the data.

Backes-Gellner, U.; Werner, A.; Mohnen, A. (2015): Effort provision in entrepreneurial teams: effects of team size, free-riding and peer pressure, in: Journal of Business Economics, Volume 85, Issue 3, pp 205-230, Berlin, Heidelberg.

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