Hans K. Hvide

Pragmatic beliefs and overconfidence

Several studies indicate that humans are overconfident about their own (relative) abilities. The paper proposes a notion of pragmatic beliefs, and shows through an example that this concept can shed light on why overconfidence emerges. Through the example, we also shed light on the idea that that bounded rationality may arise endogenously in a game - without assuming complexity costs.

Risk Taking in Selection Contests

We study selection contests in which the strategic variable is degree of risk rather than amount of effort. The selection efficiency of such contests is examined. We show that the selection efficiency of a contest may be improved by limiting the competition in two ways; a) by having a small number of contestants, and b) by restricting contestant quality. The results may contribute to the understanding of phenomena like promotion processes in large firms, selection of fund managers and research tournaments.

The Quality of Entrepreneurs

What determines the quality of entrepreneurs? To address this question, the paper proposes a simple model of the interaction between individual workers’ decision to become entrepreneurs and established firms’ effort to keep their best workers and ideas. The main prediction from the model is that larger firms produce entrepreneurs of higher quality than smaller firms. I also find that, making firm size endogenous, stronger property rights protection makes the optimal firm size larger. Using novel and unique Norwegian data, I obtain results that are consistent with previous employer size exerting a noticeable influence on entrepreneurial performance. For example, increasing previous employer size from the 25 percent quartile to the 75 percent quartile increases yearly operating returns on assets by 6 percentage points.

Cultural Diversity, Status Concerns and the Organization of Work

A well-documented human tendency is to compare outcomes with others, trying to outperform them. These tendencies vary across cultures and among different individuals in a given society. To understand the implications of such diversity in status considerations on wages, contracts, sorting, and output we use a standard principal agent framework in which firms consist of two workers and a principal. First, we find that, in equilibrium, firms mix workers with different status concerns. Second, although workers may have the same productivity, equilibrium will generate a dispersion in (expected) wages, and workers with status concerns will have more high-powered incentives, work more and earn more than workers who do not care about status. Third, we find that a more diverse workforce can increase the total output of the economy. This increase in output is a result of the higher effort exerted by the status minded workers that offsets the reduction in effort by those who do not care about status.

Lean and Hungry or Fat and Content? Entrepreneurs' Wealth and Start-Up Performance

If entrepreneurs are liquidity constrained and not able to borrow to operate on an efficient scale, economic theory predicts that entrepreneurs with more personal wealth should do better than those with less wealth. We test this hypothesis using a novel data set covering a large panel of start-ups from Norway. Consistent with liquidity constraints, we find a positive relation between founder prior wealth and start-up size. The relationship between prior wealth and start-up performance, as measured by profitability on assets, increases in the first three wealth quartiles. In the top wealth quartile, however, profitability drops sharply in wealth. Our findings are consistent with a luxury good interpretation of entrepreneurship and that higher wealth may induce a less alert or a less dedicated management. We conclude that an abundance of resources might do more harm than good for start-ups.

Management of Knowledge Workers

We study how firm-specific complementary assets and intellectual property rights affect the management of knowledge workers. The main results show when a firm will wish to sue workers that leave with innovative ideas, and the effects of complementary assets on wages and on worker initiative. We argue that firms protected weakly by complementary assets must sue leaving workers in order to obtain positive profits. Moreover, firms with more complementary assets pay higher wages and have lower turnover, but the higher pay has a detrimental effect on worker initiative. Finally, our analysis suggests that strengthening firms property rights protection reduces turnover costs but weakens worker initiative.

Stock Investments at Work

Stock market investment decisions of individuals are positively correlated with that of co-workers. Sorting of unobservably similar individuals to the same workplaces is unlikely to explain our results, as evidenced by the investment behavior of individuals that move between plants. Purchases made under stronger co-worker purchase activity are not associated with higher returns. Moreover, social interaction appears to drive the purchase of within-industry stocks; an investment mistake. Overall, our results suggest a strong influence of co-workers on investment choices, but not an influence that improves the quality of investment decisions.

Free-Entry Equilibrium in a Market for Certifiers

The role of certifiers is to test products for quality, and to communicate the test results to the market. We construct a free-entry model of certification, where each certifier chooses a test standard and a price for certification. In equilibrium, certifiers differentiate their test standards, products of different quality are certified by different certifiers, the price for certifying a high-quality product is higher than the price for certifying a low-quality product, and the net gain from certification is increasing in the (non-observable) product quality. We test and find support for these predictions in the market for MBA education, and also discuss how to apply the model to questions of regulation and minimum quality standards.

Capital Structure Under Costly Enforcement

We consider financial structure and repayment behavior in a setting where cash flows are private information to the entrepreneur and the cost of enforcing repayment differs across security holders. If enforcement costs are lower for shareholders than for creditors, a mixed capital structure with debt and equity can obtain in equilibrium. Under a mixed capital structure, creditors intervene in low cash-flow states while shareholders intervene in high cash-flow states. Moreover, strategic defaults, costly bankruptcy, shareholder intervention, and violation of absolute priority occur with positive probability on the equilibrium path. Several of the predictions from our framework are consistent with evidence not readily explainable by existing theories.

Self-Awareness, Uncertainty, and Markets with Overconfidence

Standard decision theoretic models take as given that agents have perfect self-awareness; they have complete knowledge of thier own abilities. In the first part of the paper we combine philosophical and empirical arguments to attack the perfect awareness assumption. In the second part we ask whether uncertainty about oneself needs to be modeled differently than uncertainty about the world, and argue that with the exception of a disturbing circularity aspect, the answer is no.