Brandy Aven

Fragmented Networks and Entrepreneurship in Late Imperial Russia

Emergent economies suffer from underdeveloped market infrastructures and insufficient public institutions to enforce contract commitments and property rights. Informal reputation-based arrangements may substitute for government enforcement, but they require close-knit networks that enable monitoring. Economic development also requires access to capital, information, and other resources, which is enabled by wide-reaching and diverse networks and not by closure. How is entrepreneurship possible given these conflicting demands? In this article, the authors examine how partnership networks and reputation channel the mobilization of capital for new enterprises, using quantitative information on 4,172 corporate partnerships during the industrialization of late imperial Russia (1869–1913). They find that reputation is locally effective in small and homogeneous network components. By contrast, founders in the largest components that form the network core raise more capital from investors but benefit less from reputation and more from brokerage opportunities and ties that reach diverse communities.

The Effects of Communication Networks and Turnover on Transactive Memory and Group Performance

We theorize that the effect of membership turnover on group processes and performance depends on a group’s communication network. We describe two mechanisms through which communication networks aff...

Structural Role Complementarity in Entrepreneurial Teams

To refine the understanding of the social network characteristics of entrepreneurial teams, we present a new construct: structural role complementarity. In particular, we examine the variation between team members’ respective abilities to act as network brokers. Based on the cofounding networks of 9,461 entrepreneurs and 2,446 large-scale industrial enterprises over 45 years in Russia’s emerging economy (1869–1913), our findings show that variation among team members’ brokering ability significantly predicts the starting capital raised by their firm. The effect is moderated by the team’s average brokering potential. When both the team’s average and variation in brokering potential is high, firms raise greater starting capital. By using multiple membership models, we demonstrate that greater starting capital is largely attributable to team factors rather than the attributes of the individual team members. We also take advantage of discriminatory laws that were passed in 1887 in an instrumental variable ana...