While prior literature offers useful insights into how property rights are determined under well-defined institutions, we investigate how some entrepreneurs are socially (dis)advantaged by ill-defined institutions and such social institutions can distort their property rights. Using qualitative interviews from Iran, we focus on the efforts by female entrepreneurs in dealing with these challenges. We label these female entrepreneurs as “institutional minors”, or individuals who are not fully empowered by social institutions to carry out social and economic transactions as equally as other social members. We offer a process model showing the mechanisms through which the institutional minority status impacts women’s entrepreneurial action in three stages, i.e., investment challenges, transaction frictions and ownership conflicts. Our model also illuminates how institutional minors may enact various tactics, such as seeking transaction “guardians”, to shape property rights re-allocation under socially-disadvantaged institutions. Our findings contribute to the entrepreneurship literature by delineating the value capture hurdles for institutional minors and offer new insights into the distribution of property rights under ill-defined institutions.
