Research summary: This article analyzes the personal, professional, associative, and institutional relationship networks in which the entrepreneur is involved and the resources embedded therein, and it proposes that an entrepreneur's social capital resources are determinants of his/her business' economic performance. The effect of social capital resources is moderated by competitive intensity in the industry and the entrepreneur's experience. A questionnaire survey and a sample of 951 small-and medium-sized firms were used to test the proposed hypotheses. Results show that economic performance is influenced more by professional and institutional network resources than by the other network resources. However, competitive intensity reduces the effect of institutional resources and increases the relevance of personal resources, whereas the entrepreneur's experience in the sector reinforces the impact of professional and institutional resources.Managerial summary: Insofar as small business entrepreneurs lack sufficient resources of their own to ensure the growth of their businesses, entrepreneurs' relationship networks can provide them with access to strategic resources. Hence, small business entrepreneurs must place all their own networks at the service of their firms. However, networks are not all equally advantageous, and each network does not prove equally advantageous in all situations. Our results show that professional and institutional networks generally contribute more to improving performance than do associative and personal networks. Moreover, as an entrepreneur's experience in the sector increases, so does the ability to exploit the advantages afforded by professional and institutional networks. In contrast, as industrial competitive intensity increases, so does the relevance of personal networks at the expense of institutional networks.

The present work addresses how and to what extent the personal and professional relationship networks of small-scale local entrepreneurs help improve their scarce resource endowments. Adopting a mechanistic and functioning oriented view of social capital, the paper suggests the existence of two different mechanisms which may explain the enrichment and entrepreneurial exploitation processes of social capital’s resources: (1) the resource mechanism, based on a network’s size and diversity, providing quantity and variety of social capital resources, and (2) the exchange mechanism, based on a network’s cohesion and relational quality, favouring the interchangeability of these resources among network members. The empirical study individually explores both the personal and professional networks of 958 Spanish entrepreneurs. Findings reveal how the two mechanisms are necessary and mutually complementary, although the resource mechanism proves more advantageous when exploiting personal networks, whereas the exchange mechanism prevails in the case of professional networks. JEL CLASSIFICATION L14; L26; M13; M14

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It has become increasingly common that sponsored content (i.e., paid ads) and non-sponsored content are jointly displayed to users, especially on e-commerce platforms. Thus, both of these contents may interact together to influence their engagement behaviors. In general, sponsored content helps brands achieve their marketing goals and provides ad revenue to the platforms. In contrast, non-sponsored content contributes to the long-term health of the platform through increasing users' engagement. A key conundrum to platforms is learning how to blend both of these contents allowing their interactions to be considered and balancing these business objectives. This paper proposes a system built for this purpose and applied to product detail pages of JD.COM, an e-commerce company. This system achieves three objectives: (a) Optimization of competing business objectives via Virtual Bids allowing the expressiveness of the valuation of the platform for these objectives. (b) Modeling the users' click behaviors considering explicitly the influence exerted by the sponsored and non-sponsored content displayed alongside through a deep learning approach. (c) Consideration of a Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) Auction design compatible with the allocation of ads and its induced externalities. Experiments are presented demonstrating the performance of the proposed system. Moreover, our approach is fully deployed and serves all traffic through JD.COM's mobile application.