Information disclosure: Technology markets and entrepreneurial strategy.

Information disclosure, whether strategic or mandatory, is crucial to reducing asymmetries, fostering transparency, and driving innovation. In economics, classic studies (Akerlof, Grossman, Milgrom) highlight how information gaps can lead to issues like adverse selection, while disclosure enhances market efficiency. However, disclosure is not without cost, as it exposes firms to competitive or regulatory risks.

In management, disclosure is examined as a strategic tool to attract investments and build legitimacy. However, sharing information can also enable imitation, forcing managers to balance the benefits of collaboration and resource attraction with the risks of losing competitive advantage. This dilemma is particularly evident in the choice between patenting or maintaining an innovation as a trade secret: patents offer legal protection but facilitate knowledge diffusion, while secrecy preserves competitive advantages but limits external knowledge spillovers.

In entrepreneurship, disclosure is key to securing resources and legitimacy, yet it also involves risks of imitation. Although it signals quality to attract investors and partners, revealing proprietary knowledge can harm entrepreneurs, especially in industries with weak intellectual property protections. Entrepreneurs must carefully manage this trade-off using tools like patents, non-disclosure agreements, or staged financing.

Despite research advancements, significant gaps remain. In technology markets, little is known about how information disclosed during transactions impacts value perception, competition, and innovation. In entrepreneurial strategy, prior work has focused on how disclosure influences competition but overlooked its role in shaping strategic search. This proposal addresses these gaps through two research lines.

The research focuses on two main objectives:
Disclosure and technology markets. This line examines how information disclosure in technology transactions fosters knowledge diffusion, affects competition, and supports growth. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in the U.S. and Europe will provide patent intelligence reports to firms, assessing the impact of disclosure on technology valuation, uncertainty, and competition.

Disclosure and entrepreneurial strategy. This line explores how entrepreneurs update their strategies when exposed to information about knowledge domains. Field experiments in Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands will assess how exposure to new domains drives opportunity exploration, strategy formulation, and business growth. The methodology combines RCTs with longitudinal data analysis and surveys. Trials in technology markets will involve patent-intensive sectors (e.g., biotechnology, telecommunications, medical devices), while experiments on entrepreneurship will analyze how domain-related information influences decision-making, domain selection, and market performance.

The results will contribute to designing policies that balance transparency and innovation incentives while providing entrepreneurs with tools to improve strategy formulation in competitive and dynamic environments.