Hong Luo is the James Dinan and Elizabeth Miller Associate Professor of Business Administration in the Strategy Unit. She teaches the Strategy course in the MBA required curriculum.
Professor Luo’s research explores how innovators develop and commercialize their ideas, with an emphasis on how far an entrepreneur should develop an idea before selling it. Her findings have strategic implications both for the entrepreneurs and for the firms or investors who acquire their ideas.
Professor Luo received her Ph.D. in Economics from Stern School of Business, New York University, where she was a recipient of the Kauffman Dissertation Fellowship in Entrepreneurship Research. A native of China, she earned an MA in Economics from Beijing University and a BA in Finance from Renmin University of China.
How completely should an innovator develop his idea before selling it? In the context of selling original movie ideas, I present a model that features the writer's private information on the idea's value, different protection levels associated with different development stages, as well as costly buyer participation. The empirical results are consistent with the model's predictions: Inexperienced writers are excluded from the market for earlier-stage ideas, restricting their choices to developing the idea fully or abandoning it; writers who have a choice select better ideas to sell at a later stage and sell worse ideas at an earlier stage.
