Economics Insights @ CBS

Over the years, the level of analytical rigor has risen in articles published in marketing academic journals. While, ceteris paribus, rigor is desirable, there is a growing sense that rigor has become a, if not the, goal for research in marketing. Consequently, other desirable characteristics, such as relevance, communicability, and simplicity, have been downplayed, to the detriment of the field of marketing.

Theories of visionary leadership propose that groups bestow leadership on exceptional group members. In contrast, social identity perspectives claim that leadership arises, in part, from a person's ability to be seen as representative of the group. Integrating these perspectives, the authors propose that effective leaders often share group members' perspectives concerning the present, yet offer a unique and compelling vision for the group's future.

We develop and test a theory of entrepreneurial endurance, or the likelihood that an entrepreneur will continue an entrepreneurial venture from one period to the next. Conceptualizing entrepreneurial endurance as a function of the entrepreneur's competence in and commitment to the entrepreneurial role, we argue that both factors should be shaped by the entrepreneur's prior employment. We focus on the effects of employer size on the prospective entrepreneur, and argue that employer size has a negative effect on both entrepreneurial competence and commitment.

We analyze the computational problem of estimating financial risk in a nested simulation. In this approach, an outer simulation is used to generate financial scenarios and an inner simulation is used to estimate future portfolio values in each scenario. We focus on one risk measure, the probability of a large loss, and we propose a new algorithm to estimate this risk. Our algorithm sequentially allocates computational effort in the inner simulation based on marginal changes in the risk estimator in each scenario.