Time: June 20th, 2019(Thursday) 10:00-11:30

　　Location: Zhifuxuan Meeting Room, National School of Development, Peking University

　　Speaker: Prof. Waverly Ding

　　Trust and Network Structure in Venture Capital Investments

　　　Sampsa Samila, Waverly W. Ding, Ying Geng

          Abstract

　　Trust has been an important building block of network-based sociological explanation of economic cooperation. However, the emphasis of this literature has largely been on particularized trust that is developed through interactions of economic actors. In this paper, we investigate the role of generalized trust and how generalized trust interacts with network structure in shaping economic cooperation among actors. We analyze data of 3,661 venture capital syndications in 15 European countries between 2000 and 2014. We show that generalized trust itself contributes to economic cooperation. More importantly, generalized trust moderates the effect of network structure in that it has a stronger effect on inducing economic cooperation where prior economic ties, direct or indirect, are lacking. In that sense, generalized trust acts as an emancipating force that frees actors from the confines of prior direct and indirect ties as the basis for identifying trusted partners. In addition, we investigate the appeal of brokers as potential partners and find whether brokers are likely to be selected as partners is contingent upon the level of generalized trust a selecting party has in its target. When an actor has a network of highly redundant (low-brokerage) relations, he is more likely to be trusted due to consistency in the role-identity expectations of these highly redundant economic connections. However, this is more likely to happen when the selecting party has relatively higher level of generalized trust in the target's social group.

　　About the Speaker

　　　Waverly Ding is Associate Professor of Management & Organization at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business. Dr. Ding earned her MBA and Ph.D. in business from the University of Chicago. Prior to joining the Smith School faculty, she was an assistant professor at Haas School of Business, the University of California at Berkeley.

　　 Dr. Ding’s research focuses on high-tech entrepreneurship and strategy, knowledge transfer between universities and industrial firms, and the U.S. biotech industry. She has also conducted research relating to labor force in science and technology. Her work has been published in Science, American Journal of Sociology, Management Science, Journal of Industrial Economics, and Research Policy.