To name your venture after Oxbridge or not, that is the question!

Abstract

This paper examines the significance of including a company's location of origin in its name, a practice known as using an eponymous location name. Our theory demonstrates that signalling an origin from a prestigious location is an appealing strategy for relatively weaker companies, whereas stronger companies tend to avoid it. We empirically test this theory on a sample of UK university spin-outs from 2010 to 2021. Eponymous location names are particularly prevalent among spin-outs from Oxbridge (i.e., Oxford and Cambridge). As predicted by our theory, eponymous location names are negatively related to measures of fundraising success after controlling for spin-out origin.