Most entrepreneurship theory was written in and about stable economies, where the future can be estimated with probabilities. This project asks what happens to that theory in an economy where it cannot.

 

Leul will interview 10 founders, five in the UAE and five in Ethiopia, about how they make decisions when information is incomplete. The UAE offers a currency pegged to the dollar, low inflation and predictable regulation. Ethiopia offers high inflation, currency devaluation and regulatory discontinuity. The same business decision therefore carries a completely different informational structure in each place.

 

The research tests whether founders in the fragile market are simply more cautious, or whether they use a different kind of reasoning altogether.