The Time-Money Trade-Off for Entrepreneurs: When to Hire the First Employee?
The Time-Money Trade-Off for Entrepreneurs: When to Hire the First Employee?
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企业家的时间与金钱的权衡：何时雇用第一位员工？
DOI：
10.2139/ssrn.2279766
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发表时间：
2011
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
C. Corbett
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Onesun Steve Yoo;G. Roels;C. Corbett
企业家需要投入资金和时间来发展他们的公司。金钱和时间通常都很稀缺，但这两种资源的性质是根本不同的。考虑一家小型、快速成长的创业型公司，我们发现，随着公司的发展，公司的关键瓶颈资源会随着时间的推移而转移，我们将招聘描述为一种以金钱换取时间以加速增长的运营机制。为了缓解时间瓶颈，创业者雇佣第一名员工的最佳时间是他们的可用现金足够多的时候。我们证明，当增长是确定性的且表现良好时，由一步前瞻性政策确定的现金阈值是最优的，即使情况并非如此。我们发现，招聘成本推迟了招聘，而招聘时间可能会推迟或加快招聘，因为在时间的机会成本变得太大之前，需要在保持增长势头和招聘需求之间进行权衡。因此，在成长型企业中，时间和金钱应该作为不同的资源进行管理。
Entrepreneurs need to invest money and time to grow their firms. Both money and time are often scarce, but the nature of these two resources is fundamentally different. Considering a small, fast-growing entrepreneurial firm, we show that the firm's key bottleneck resource shifts from money to time as the firm grows, and we characterize hiring as an operational mechanism for trading money for time to accelerate growth. The optimal time for entrepreneurs to hire their first employee occurs as soon as their available cash is sufficiently large, in order to alleviate the time bottleneck. We show that the cash threshold determined from a one-step look-ahead policy is optimal when growth is deterministic and performs well, even when that is not the case. We find that hiring costs delay hiring, whereas hiring times may either delay or expedite hiring, because of the non-trivial tradeoff between the need to preserve the growth momentum and the need to hire, before the opportunity cost of time becomes too large. Hence, time and money should be managed as distinct resources in growth-oriented firms.