GAIA RUBERA

How do founders attract and sustain market attention over time? While prior research often portrays founders as market-shaping agents, it has overlooked the reciprocal nature of founder–market interactions and how their effects evolve. Drawing on the entrepreneurial action literature and the design view of entrepreneurship, we develop a longitudinal framework that highlights the role of entrepreneurial artifacts—conceptual and material—in capturing market attention. We identify three theoretically relevant pathways to market attention: (1) founders leading the market discussion, (2) founders following the market discussion (both forms of conceptual artifacts), and (3) introducing new products (a material artifact). We argue that the effectiveness of each pathway changes over time. Using a sample of 1,529 U.S. startups founded in 2014–2015 and a novel combination of social media data, text analytics (LDA), and time-series methods (VAR), we find that leading the market discussion is most effective early on, while following becomes more beneficial as time progresses. New product introductions show a delayed but increasingly positive effect. Our study contributes to entrepreneurship research by offering a longitudinal view of how founders can attract and grow market attention through different artifacts, addressing calls for studies on founder-market interaction over time.

We study the role of perceived threats from other cultures induced by terrorist attacks and criminal events on public discourse and support for radical-right parties. We develop a rule which allocates Twitter users to electoral districts in Germany and use a machine-earningmethod to compute measures of textual similarity between the tweets they produce and tweets by accounts of the main German parties. Using the exogenous timing of attacks, we find that, after an event, Twitter language becomes on average more similar to that of the main radical-right party, AfD. The result is driven by a larger share of tweets discussing immigrants and Muslims, common AfD topics, and by a more negative sentiment of these tweets. Shifts in language similarity are correlated with changes in vote shares between federal elections. These results point to the role of perceived threats from minorities on the success of nationalist parties.

• Terrorist attacks, cultural incidents, and the vote for radical parties: analyzing text from Twitter (1.330 Kb)

Despite the increasing use of social media among personalities such as politicians, athletes, and entertainment celebrities, little is known about the intensity of competition that these pop- ular users engage in to draw the attention of other users, and how their competition affects  the users’ engagement with social networks. In this research we propose a model where social media users supply content in return for user attention. Using Twitter data on soccer players from the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), we estimate a demand model where users decide how to allocate their attention among players, based on their content posted on social media and their performance on the soccer field. We consider the amount of tweets mentioning a player’s account as a measure for the level of attention captured by the player. On the supply side, players decide the amount of social media content posted on the platform. We show that the attention substitution between players depends on their posting activity and soccer perfor- mance, but also on personal characteristics, such as physical attractiveness and team affiliation. Our analysis suggests that the competitive pressure to capture user attention is responsible  for about one out of three tweets posted by players. This additional content benefits the so- cial network, increasing by 7% the users’ activity on the platform. We also quantify the effect on user activity of a revenue-sharing model in which Twitter rewards players for posting tweets.

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