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Microfinance is a social innovation to alleviate poverty by providing small, unsecured loans to local indigent entrepreneurs. Many borrowers use microfinance loans to seed their small entrepreneurial businesses. However, high interest rates charged by microfinance institutions (MFIs) are likely to increase the financial burden of those borrowers. In this study, we adopt an opportunity co-creation perspective to analyze the factors that affect microfinance interest rates. We argue that new opportunities in a social venture could be co-created by multiple stakeholders, including MFIs, borrower communities, female borrowers, governments, MFI managers, and employees. We tested our hypothese on interest rate setting of MFIs by using 4,187 organization-year observations from 2003 to 2011 across 93 countries, and the empirical results largely support the hypotheses. Our opportunity co-creation perspective extends the current understanding on microfinance and provides important managerial implications.

We revisit the assertion that entrepreneurs are uniquely characterized in their ways of thinking; specifically being relatively more prone to the overconfidence bias and the representativeness heuristic in their decision-making. We replicate an earlier seminal study in entrepreneurial cognition, with a wider and more current survey. We then extend that analysis by investigating whether such "different thinking" leads to different (i.e., less rational) choices and different (i.e., worse) firm performance. Given the expected differences, we also investigate whether there exist other factors that affect the use of such biases and heuristics, to control their effects on focal outcomes.

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Prior studies assert that social trust may positively influence the economic performance of countries and firms (within those countries). This paper proposes a more nuanced mechanism whereby corporate social responsibility (CSR) mediates the relationship between country-level social trust and firm-level financial performance.Anchored in neo-institutional theory, we theorize that social trust instills norms of trustworthiness and willingness to trust others guiding individual and corporate behaviors. In order to comply with such norms and gain legitimacy, firms in hightrust society are more likely to commit to CSR activities that serve the interests of stakeholders. CSR activities, in turn, can positively influence financial performance by enabling firms to access stakeholders' resources and capabilities and to decrease transactions costs in the stakeholder relationships. We tested our theory by analyzing 9818 firm-year observations across 34 countries, during the 2006 to 2015 period.Our analysis shows the expected CSR mediation in the relationship between social trust and firm-level financial performance. Our findings are robust across different models addressing the concerns of endogeneity, alternative measures, and potential moderators.