Marginal ideas
Status: Working paper
Last updated: 2026-05-06
Summary
Entrepreneurs crowd into promising startup ideas without internalizing the business-stealing costs they impose on one another. The paper shows that the least promising idea that still attracts funding—the marginal idea—can therefore offer the highest social return. It develops a sufficient statistic for this congestion and estimates it using 37,818 U.S. startups grouped into 2,045 idea niches.
Paper links
Video
Presentations
NBER Summer Institute, Entrepreneurship, 2026
Coverage
Marginal Ideas, Expected Parrot
Cite
@unpublished{horton2026marginalideas,
title = {{Marginal ideas}},
author = {Sariri, Amir and Horton, John J.},
year = {2026},
url = {https://john-joseph-horton.com/papers/marginal-ideas/}
}