Entrepreneurial success and failure: Confidence and fallible judgement

Excess entry – or the high failure rate of market-entry decisions – is often attributed to overconfidence exhibited by entreprene urs. We show analytically that whereas excess entry is an inevitable consequence of imperfect assessments of entrepreneurial skill, it does not imply overconfidence. Judgmental fallibility leads to excess entry even when everyone is underconfident. Self-selection implies greater confidence (but not necessarily overconfidence) among those who start new businesses than those who do not and among successful entrants than failures. Our results question claims that “entrepreneurs are overconfident” and emphasize the need to understand the role of judgmental fallibility in producing economic outcomes.Excess entry, fallible judgment, overconfidence, skill uncertainty, entrepreneurship, LeeX

Overoptimism among entrepreneurs in new ventures: the role of information and motivation

There are various reasons why some entrepreneurs may be more overoptimistic at the start of their ventures than others. We distinguish between four broad categories of determining factors and three areas of overoptimism (income, psychological burden and leisure time) and empirically investigate those for a sample of Dutch start-ups. The first category is information. We find that more specifically informed entrepreneurs are less likely to be overoptimistic while (general) educationincreases overoptimism. The second category is motivation. Entrepreneurs motivated by pull factors are found to be less overoptimistic than those who are ‘pushed’ to start a venture. The third category encompasses personal characteristics such as gender, age, having a life partner and access to other income. The fourth category of firm characteristics includes factors such as sector, take-over versus newly started business, and home-based versus separate business premises. We find little additional explanatory power of these personal and firm characteristics.

Entrepreneurial exit in real and imagined markets

Entrepreneurs exit their business due to selection pressures experienced in the market place, i.e. business failure. Next to this well known ex-post decision to exit, entrepreneurs select exantewhether they are willing to pursue an entrepreneurial career at all, or to give up theseentrepreneurial intentions. Hardly anything is known about the latter selection process in imagined markets that precedes the variety creation and selection process in real markets. This paper explores and explains the prevalence of these two selection processes using survey data on 20,000 individuals in 27 European countries and the US in 2007. We distinguish business failures from exit by sell-off. Results indicate that individuals in the US are less likely to exit imagined markets, and are more likely to have exited the real market (especially by selling their business) than Europeans. Individuals in a Corporatist welfare state regime have relatively high chances to exit imagined markets. Business owners in urban environments are more likely to fail, while individuals with a high risk tolerance, a high education and self-employed parents are less likely to exit in imagined as well as in real markets (via business failure). This study shows that exit in real and in imagined markets is differently affected by competition and institutions. These selection environments have differential effects on entrepreneurial aspirations and actions of individuals, and provide evidence for the dissimilar nature of exit in real and exit in imagined markets.

Muppets and gazelles: political and methodological biases in entrepreneurship research

Despite an almost universally accepted belief outside academia that entrepreneurial activity is a positive driving force in the economy, the accumulated evidence remains largely inconclusive. This article positions the increased interest in entrepreneurship since the 1980s within its historical context and highlights the significant methodological problems with its analysis. Taking these problems into account it reevaluates the performance of entrepreneurial firms in terms of innovation, job creation, economic growth, productivity growth, and happiness to show how both positive and negative interpretations can emerge. A pattern of increasingly positive interpretation is observed as one moves from analysis to policy. To address this bias, the article suggests the single category “entrepreneurial firms” be broken up along a continuum from the large number of economically marginal, undersized, poor performance enterprises to the small number of high performance “gazelles” that drive most positive impact on the economy. This would allow a more realistic evaluation of the impact of entrepreneurs by avoiding a composition fallacy that assigns the benefits of entrepreneurship to the average firm

"I Think I Can, I Think I Can": Overconfidence and Entrepreneurial Behavior

Many firms fail shortly after inception. Yet individuals continue starting businesses. Prewar economists such as Keynes invoked animal spirits and stressed psychological factors in their explanations of economic behavior. Using a large sample obtained from surveys conducted in 18 countries, we study what variables have a significant impact on an individual's decision to start a business. We find strong evidence that subjective, and often biased, perceptions have a crucial impact on new business creation across all countries in our sample. Our findings are consistent with the idea that individuals rely significantly on their perceptions rather than on objective probabilities, evaluate their businesses prospects by taking an overconfident "inside view" of their situation, and, as a result, overestimate their likelihood of success.Entrepreneurship; Self-employment; Perceptions; Perceptual variables; Overconfidence

Overconfidence, optimism and entrepreneurship

Overconfidence is one of the alleged drivers for market entry. However, establishing its effect is challenging and much of the existing entrepreneurship literature confusingly conflates overconfidence with optimism. In the present study, we use validated scales to analyze the relationship between overconfidence and two important aspects of entrepreneurship, while explicitly controlling for optimism. Specifically, we study the role of overconfidence in developing intentions about entering entrepreneurship as well as how overconfidence relates to entrepreneurial orientation. Our findings show that overconfidence is related to intended market entry but not to the market position (entrepreneurial orientation) of the business

Before Turning into Ashes: A Study of Entrepreneurial Cognition, Learning, and Exit

Entrepreneurial practices such as discovery, evaluation, and exploitation of opportunities, decision-making, and problem solving are influenced by mental processes and cognitive mechanisms. Decision-making studies in the field of entrepreneurship confirm that entrepreneurs have strong tendency to use cognitive mechanisms such as biases and heuristics to simplify their decision-making processes. Compared to non-entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs show higher levels of cognitive bias. By focusing on cognitive mechanisms of entrepreneurs, this study answers the question of why some individuals insist on continuing their entrepreneurial journey while failure-related phenomena such as critical setbacks and counterfactual thoughts exist. Unlike the prior research that have focused on the antecedents of failure and learning outcomes of failure, the current research takes a different approach and studies failure and learning as entrepreneurial journeys rather than simply considering them as incidents or outcomes of a new venture. Therefore, instead of studying ventures that are rising from the ashes, the author investigates the behavior of entrepreneurs before their ventures turn into ashes

Boundedly Rational Entrepreneurs and Antitrust

This article examines entrepreneurial activity and its implication for policy and antitrust law from a behavioral perspective. In particular, the analysis here focuses on the role of two sets of behavioral phenomena—overconfident beliefs and risk-seeking preferences—in facilitating boundedly rational entrepreneurship. Boundedly rational entrepreneurs may engage in entrepreneurial activity, such as the starting of new business ventures, under circumstances in which rational entrepreneurs would decline to do so. Consequently, overconfident or risk-seeking entrants compete with their more rational counterparts and create a post-entry landscape that differs markedly from the picture assumed by traditional economic accounts of entrepreneurial activity. The behaviorally informed analysis of entry sheds new light on the dynamics of competition among entrepreneurs and on its implications for policy and antitrust law

Business experience and start-up size: buying more lottery tickets next time around?

This paper explores the determinants of start-up size by focusing on a cohort of 6247 businesses that started trading in 2004, using a unique dataset on customer records at Barclays Bank. Quantile regressions show that prior business experience is significantly related with start-up size, as are a number of other variables such as age, education and bank account activity. Quantile treatment effects (QTE) estimates show similar results, with the effect of business experience on (log) start-up size being roughly constant across the quantiles. Prior personal business experience leads to an increase in expected start-up size of about 50%. Instrumental variable QTE estimates are even higher, although there are concerns about the validity of the instrument