Economic Returns to Entrepreneurial Behavior

Highly turbulent environments require firms to act entrepreneurially. The returns to entrepreneurial activities are known as entrepreneurial rents. Following the payments perspective, these rents are allocated to the entrepreneurial resources of the firm as factor payments. However, unlike other factor payments, little is known about how to value these types of rents. An analysis of the economics and management literature reveals that entrepreneurial rents are a return to alertness, subjective judgment, asset control, and uncertainty bearing. Furthermore, entrepreneurial rents are noncontractible and temporary. This paper introduces two complementary valuation models that capture these characteristics and that explicitly impute value to various entrepreneurial activities.