Celebrating Success: Dr Sonja Sperber

Congratulations to Dr Sonja Sperber on the recent publication of two of her papers in European Management Review.

Abstracts:

Linder, C. & Sperber, S. (2020). “Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall – Who Is the Greatest Investor of all?” Effects of Better-than-Average Beliefs on Venture Funding. 

Agency theory considers information the most decisive element in investor–entrepreneur relations. Building on the notion of better-than-average (BTA) beliefs, we investigate the extent to which information asymmetries between investors and entrepreneurs may also emerge on paths other than the self-interest or opportunistic behaviour of rational actors. Based on a data set of 176 investors from 23 different German financial institutions, we conduct a conditional process analysis that indicates approximately 30% of all professional investors hold unjustified BTA beliefs regarding their abilities to identify flaws in new venture ideas, which leads to inaccurate financing decisions. We further find evidence that investors generally tend to underfund start-up projects if they perceive little similarity with the founders, but overfund projects if interpersonal similarities are high. Moreover, we demonstrate that high BTA beliefs facilitate engagement in competition with peers for the best investment option.

Fliaster, A. & Sperber, S. (2020). Knowledge Acquisition for Innovation: Networks of Top Managers in the European Fashion Industry. 

Past research revealed that social networks play a decisive role for the receipt of new knowledge by engineers and middle-level managers and, thus, essentially contribute to innovation. However, the question of by which network ties top managers – that is, the key organizational decision-makers – acquire which kind of innovation-related knowledge resources has not yet been explored systematically. Our paper addresses this research gap by empirically analyzing knowledge ties of top executives in the European fashion and accessories industry. We draw on the concept of relational embeddedness and focus on knowledge providers and knowledge ties of top managers. Based on this theoretical framework, we conducted 22 semi-structured interviews with top executives from 11 leading European companies within this industry. We present the main results of this explorative study and identify its important implications from both research and managerial perspective.

Both papers are listed here