Power law distributions in entrepreneurship: Implications for theory and research

G. Christopher Crawford, Herman Aguinis, Benyamin Lichtenstein, Per Davidsson and Bill McKelvey

Journal of Business Venturing, 2015, vol. 30, issue 5, 696-713

Abstract: A long-held assumption in entrepreneurship research is that normal (i.e., Gaussian) distributions characterize variables of interest for both theory and practice. We challenge this assumption by examining more than 12,000 nascent, young, and hyper-growth firms. Results reveal that variables which play central roles in resource-, cognition-, action-, and environment-based entrepreneurship theories exhibit highly skewed power law distributions, where a few outliers account for a disproportionate amount of the distribution's total output. Our results call for the development of new theory to explain and predict the mechanisms that generate these distributions and the outliers therein. We offer a research agenda, including a description of non-traditional methodological approaches, to answer this call.

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Generative mechanisms; Growth; Outliers; Power law distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (64)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0883902615000026
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jbvent:v:30:y:2015:i:5:p:696-713

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusvent.2015.01.001

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Venturing is currently edited by S. Venkataraman

More articles in Journal of Business Venturing from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().