The Economics for Business Podcast

Veteran venture capital investor Pete Farner distills experience from four decades of entrepreneurship and investing on the Economics For Business Podcast #114. Passion, perseverance and intelligence are the three critical attributes he looks for in investable entrepreneurs, an insight drawn from a broad survey that we summarize here.

The market for healthcare provides us with a pertinent example of co-navigation of radical value uncertainty. For consumers, there is no certainty available — they can’t know which doctors or providers will give them the best experience, they don’t know the right means to choose to attain their end (health), and they can’t use the usual market price signals in the search for value since the price of healthcare is not visible to them. They don’t purchase the product, they purchase insurance, a different financial product than the healthcare experience they really need.

In a recently published paper titled “Subjective Value In Entrepreneurship,” Professors Bylund and Packard apply the principle of subjective value to generate significant new avenues of thinking for entrepreneurial businesses to pursue.

For any size and any type of business, the generation of value…