Perceiving the Value of Business Planning

The value of business planning has been subject to much controversy over the past years. In-deed, there appears to be an escalation in empirical research, with opposing implications and diverging approaches to teaching entrepreneurship. Most empirical studies have taken an ex-post, comparative view of the relationship between planning and performance. In this paper, we introduce an ex-ante perspective by formally characterizing the decision of the nascent entrepreneur whether or not to start a business and whether or not to plan beforehand. We focus on the evaluative function of business planning, define the information value of busi-ness planning, identify its influencing factors, and show how costs of business planning de-termine the quality of planning. We find as the crucial aspect of good evaluative business planning that it helps to identify and to sort out poor business ideas before they reach the mar-ket. We contrast our results with conclusions drawn from empirical studies that have been critical of planning. In a setting in which, by construction, planning has a positive value, we question several popular negative implications by showing how they result from an incom-plete sample of entrepreneurs.Business plan, Start-ups, Entrepreneurship, Decision Making, Uncertainty

Balancing the Tradeoff between Personal Fulfillment and Competitiveness in Venture Creation

The fascination of venture creation is associated with an entrepreneur’s opportunity of achieving personal fulfillment. In reality, however, many nascent entrepreneurs discover that much of their original vision is sacrificed in the process of creating a startup. In this paper we address the conflict between the entrepreneur’s fulfillment and the startup’s competitiveness from a negotiationanalytic perspective. We show how the nature of this conflict is transformed in the process of business planning, and we demonstrate how a purely marketoriented focus on expansion serves to enhance personal fulfillment. Our analytical approach has practical implications for business development and entrepreneurial education.Venture Creation, Business Development, Negotiation Analysis

Bidding for envy-freeness: A procedural approach to n-player fair-division problems

We develop a procedure for implementing an efficient and envy-free allocation of m objects among n individuals with the possibility of monetary side-payments. The procedure eliminates envy by compensating envious players. It is fully descriptive and says explicitly which compensations should be made, and in what order. Moreover, it is simple enough to be carried out without computer support. We formally characterize the properties of the procedure, show how it establishes envy-freeness with minimal resources, and demonstrate its application to a wide class of fair-division problems.fair-division procedures, envy-freeness

Procedural Support for Cooperative Negotiations: Theoretical Design and Practical Implementation

We discuss the theoretical design of algorithms for solving distributional conflicts within groups. We consider an algorithm to be procedural if the implementation of the outcome requires the participation of the players, or if it can even be conducted by the players themselves without computational assistance. We compare two procedures for multilateral problems of fair division; both establish envy-freeness, given the possibility of monetary compensations between players

Perceiving the Value of Business Planning

The value of business planning has been subject to much controversy over the past years. In-deed, there appears to be an escalation in empirical research, with opposing implications and diverging approaches to teaching entrepreneurship. Most empirical studies have taken an ex-post, comparative view of the relationship between planning and performance. In this paper, we introduce an ex-ante perspective by formally characterizing the decision of the nascent entrepreneur whether or not to start a business and whether or not to plan beforehand. We focus on the evaluative function of business planning, define the information value of busi-ness planning, identify its influencing factors, and show how costs of business planning de-termine the quality of planning. We find as the crucial aspect of good evaluative business planning that it helps to identify and to sort out poor business ideas before they reach the mar-ket. We contrast our results with conclusions drawn from empirical studies that have been critical of planning. In a setting in which, by construction, planning has a positive value, we question several popular negative implications by showing how they result from an incom-plete sample of entrepreneurs

KONFLIKTSTRUKTUREN UND WERTSCHÖPFUNGSPOTENZIALE: EINE VERHANDLUNGSANALYTISCHE PERSPEKTIVE

Bei einer Verhandlung geht es immer um Verteilung – Verteilung von Vorteilen oder von Nachteilen. Die Verteilung ist jedoch überhaupt erst möglich, weil die Verhandlung einen gemeinsamen Wertschöpfungsprozess impliziert, der von einer Partei alleine nicht zu realisieren wäre. Die für Gestaltungszwecke wichtigste Erkenntnis der Verhandlungsanalyse ist, dass Synergie durch Unterschiedlichkeit und nicht durch Gleichheit der interagierenden Parteien entsteht. Die Parteien werden dabei als Rollen gesehen, die von Spielern in der Verhandlung ausgefüllt werden. Die Charakterisierung der Rollen ist Teil der Problemstruktur. Die Unterscheidung zwischen einer Problem- und einer Spielerebene erlaubt es, Konfliktstrukturen zu bewerten und Verfahren zu entwickeln, um das darin enthaltene Wertschöpfungspotenzial produktiv zu nutzen

A bi-objective column generation algorithm for the multi-commodity minimum cost flow problem

We present a column generation algorithm for solving the bi-objective multi-commodity minimum cost flow problem. This method is based on the bi-objective simplex method and Dantzig–Wolfe decomposition. The method is initialised by optimising the problem with respect to the first objective, a single objective multi-commodity flow problem, which is solved using Dantzig–Wolfe decomposition. Then, similar to the bi-objective simplex method, our algorithm iteratively moves from one non-dominated extreme point to the next one by finding entering variables with the maximum ratio of improvement of the second objective over deterioration of the first objective. Our method reformulates the problem into a bi-objective master problem over a set of capacity constraints and several single objective linear fractional sub-problems each over a set of network flow conservation constraints. The master problem iteratively updates cost coefficients for the fractional sub-problems. Based on these cost coefficients an optimal solution of each sub-problem is obtained. The solution with the best ratio objective value out of all sub-problems represents the entering variable for the master basis. The algorithm terminates when there is no entering variable which can improve the second objective by deteriorating the first objective. This implies that all non-dominated extreme points of the original problem are obtained. We report on the performance of the algorithm on several directed bi-objective network instances with different characteristics and different numbers of commodities

The Goal Achievement of Federal Lending Programs

Governmental intervention in credit markets typically involves the allocation of credit in the light of market failures. In this paper we evaluate federal lending programs while presuming positive externalities and symmetrically informed market participants. For common objectives of governmental lending institutions we verify that optimal lending structures require the application of the gap lender principle. We also show that lending programs can never be selffinancing, due to the positive subsidy margin. Within this general framework, we contrast the policies of the US SBA and the German KfW and show that neither institution features an optimal lending structure