Marriage as a Rat Race: Noisy Premarital Investments with Assortative Matching

This chapter provides a review of the scholarly literature on entrepreneurial teams and team formation. It pays special attention to two emerging areas of research that present many promising opportunities for future work. First, the chapter discusses the role of resource transfer in the context of start-up firms. It argues that an understanding of the antecedents and consequences of the founding process would be significantly advanced by more explicit theorizing and effort to empirically identify the specific types of resources entrepreneurial team members bring to start-up firms. It highlights one recent advancement in this space—work that has focused on a team’s ability to transfer customer and client relationships from the parent to start-up firms—and provides an outline of open research questions in this realm. Second, the chapter provides a primer on a recent methodological advancement—the use of two-sided assortative matching models—that can be applied to entrepreneurial team assembly to alleviate ongoing concerns that team formation is fundamentally an endogenous process. It demonstrates how these models can be applied using a wide variety of founder, cofounder, and early team member attributes, including an individual’s ability to transfer customer relationships. Importantly, it proposes that synergies emerging from the use of two-sided assortative matching models to study a broader set of team member attributes that include resource transfer will open promising new avenues for future research.

Download Full-text

Assortative Matching of Tourists and Destinations: Agents or Algorithms?

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su13041987 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (4) ◽

pp. 1987

Author(s):

Ralf Buckley ◽

Mary-Ann Cooper

Keyword(s):

Tourism Industry ◽

Digital Data ◽

Share Price ◽

Academic Disciplines ◽

Destination Marketing ◽

Assortative Matching ◽

Multiple Sources ◽

Travel Agents ◽

Price Trends ◽

Automated Algorithms

We propose that assortative matching, a well-established paradigm in other industry sectors and academic disciplines, can underpin the concept of destination matching. This provides a new foundation to integrate research concepts and terminology in destination marketing and destination choice. We argue that the commercial tourism industry already applies destination matching approaches, with three historical phases. Initially, matching of tourists and destinations relied on the tacit expertise of specialist agents. This still applies in specialist subsectors. For generalist travel and accommodation, human agents were partially replaced by online travel agents, OTAs, which are customised algorithms operating only in the travel sector. These still exist, but their share price trends suggest decreasing significance. Currently, automated assortative algorithms use multiple sources of digital data to push appealing offers to potential purchasers, across all retail sectors. Digital marketing strategies for tourism products, enterprises, and destinations are now just one category of generalised product–purchaser matching, using entirely automated algorithms. Researchers do not have access to proprietary algorithms, but we can identify which components they incorporate by analysing their underlying patents. We propose that theories of destination marketing and choice need to reflect these recent and rapid real-world changes via deliberate analysis of destination matching.

Download Full-text