Advising Entrepreneurs: Optimal Recommendation of Alternatives
研究了顾问如何根据创业者的执行能力、试错成本等因素，策略性地推荐替代方案并安排顺序，以最大化创业者的探索成功率。
Problem definition: Facing emergent business challenges, entrepreneurs often seek guidance from experienced advisors. When multiple alternatives could potentially solve the entrepreneur’s problem, advisors can lead the entrepreneur’s exploration by choosing which alternative(s) to suggest and in what sequence. Methodology/results: We develop a dynamic game-theoretic model that captures the sequential interaction between an advisor and an entrepreneur. The advisor chooses how to recommend alternative solutions, and the entrepreneur chooses which solution to try. The trial’s success depends on the viability of a solution and the entrepreneur’s execution capability. When a trial of a recommended solution fails, the belief about the viability of the solution is updated. Managerial implications: Our analysis reveals that the advisor should strategically recommend alternatives based on the entrepreneur’s execution capability, trial costs, and correlation between alternatives (among other factors). When the trial of the first alternative fails, the advisor should readily offer a new alternative if the entrepreneur’s capability is either very high or very low. Otherwise, the advisor should encourage the entrepreneur to try the same solution multiple times. In order to motivate and sustain the entrepreneur’s exploration over time and across solutions, the advisor may find it optimal to recommend inferior solutions before superior ones (e.g., when trial costs are different or the entrepreneur can improve her capability with experience) or recommend multiple solutions simultaneously (e.g., when there is correlation between alternatives). Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2022.0361 .