Experiments On Entrepreneurial Decision Making

Experiments on Entrepreneurial Decision Making defines the structure of a decision-making process including examples, suggests a classification of experiments, explains different experimental designs, describes quality criteria of experiments and addresses the differences between economic and psychological experiments.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.In this book, the authors present a challenge for future research to build a stronger, more complete understanding of entrepreneurial phenomena. They argue that this more complete picture of entrepreneurial phenomena will likely come from scholars who undertake at least some trailblazing projects; from scholars who broaden the range of research questions, the potential outcomes of entrepreneurial action, and the selection and combination of research methods; and from researchers who avoid the endless debates about the margins of the field and its sub-fields or about whether one theoretical or philosophical lens is superior to another. This book offers suggestions for future research through a variety of topics including prosocial action, innovation, family business, sustainability and development, and the financial, social, and psychological costs of failure. It promises to make an important contribution to the development of the field and help academics, organizations, and society make useful contributions to the generation of entrepreneurial research.

In this volume, Dean Shepherd focuses on the varying topics of entrepreneurship unified through conjoint analysis. Although the topic of entrepreneurial decision making is broad, in doing so, he reveals the mechanisms that come into play during the entrepreneurial decision-making process.

This fascinating book aims to provide a deeper understanding of the decision-making processes of entrepreneurs. This is achieved via a comparison of entrepreneurial individuals with different levels of expertise in contexts with varying degrees of potential for entrepreneurial success. This multidisciplinary study is based on entrepreneurship theory and empirical research as well as cognitive psychology. The cognitive perspective provides a link between the entrepreneur and new business creation by focusing on an individual's cognitive behaviour rather than on their personality traits. The essential issues of gathering and application of knowledge and expertise are also addressed: one of the most important implications of the study is that successful entrepreneurial decision-making behaviour can actually be taught and learned. The book concludes, however, that the provision of optimal teaching methods of this decision-making behaviour is a stiff challenge faced by entrepreneurship education. Presenting a novel combination of cognitive psychology and entrepreneurship theory with important practical implications, this book will strongly appeal to those involved in the study of entrepreneurship and cognitive psychology, and business and management. Entrepreneurs themselves will also find much to interest them in this book.

How tech companies like Google, Airbnb, StubHub, and Facebook learn from experiments in our data-driven world—an excellent primer on experimental and behavioral economics Have you logged into Facebook recently? Searched for something on Google? Chosen a movie on Netflix? If so, you've probably been an unwitting participant in a variety of experiments—also known as randomized controlled trials—designed to test the impact of different online experiences. Once an esoteric tool for academic research, the randomized controlled trial has gone mainstream. No tech company worth its salt (or its share price) would dare make major changes to its platform without first running experiments to understand how they would influence user behavior. In this book, Michael Luca and Max Bazerman explain the importance of experiments for decision making in a data-driven world. Luca and Bazerman describe the central role experiments play in the tech sector, drawing lessons and best practices from the experiences of such companies as StubHub, Alibaba, and Uber. Successful experiments can save companies money—eBay, for example, discovered how to cut $50 million from its yearly advertising budget—or bring to light something previously ignored, as when Airbnb was forced to confront rampant discrimination by its hosts. Moving beyond tech, Luca and Bazerman consider experimenting for the social good—different ways that governments are using experiments to influence or “nudge” behavior ranging from voter apathy to school absenteeism. Experiments, they argue, are part of any leader's toolkit. With this book, readers can become part of “the experimental revolution.”

Behavioral strategy continues to attract increasing research interest within the broader field of strategic management. Research in behavioral strategy has clear scope for development in tandem with such traditional streams of strategy research that involve economics, markets, resources, and technology. The key roles of psychology, organizational behavior, and behavioral decision making in the theory and practice of strategy have yet to be comprehensively grasped. Given that strategic thinking and strategic decision making are importantly concerned with human cognition, human decisions, and human behavior, it makes eminent sense to bring some balance in the strategy field by complementing the extant emphasis on the “objective’ economics-based view with substantive attention to the “subjective” individual-oriented perspective. This calls for more focused inquiries into the role and nature of the individual strategy actors, and their cognitions and behaviors, in the strategy research enterprise. For the purposes of this book series, behavioral strategy would be broadly construed as covering all aspects of the role of the strategy maker in the entire strategy field. The scholarship relating to behavioral strategy is widely believed to be dispersed in diverse literatures. These existing contributions that relate to behavioral strategy within the overall field of strategy has been known and perhaps valued by most scholars all along, but were not adequately appreciated or brought together as a coherent sub-field or as a distinct perspective of strategy. This book series on Research in Behavioral Strategy will cover the essential progress made thus far in this admittedly fragmented literature and elaborate upon fruitful streams of scholarship. More importantly, the book series will focus on providing a robust and comprehensive forum for the growing scholarship in behavioral strategy. In particular, the volumes in the series will cover new views of interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks and models (dealing with all behavioral aspects), significant practical problems of strategy formulation, implementation, and evaluation, and emerging areas of inquiry. The series will also include comprehensive empirical studies of selected segments of business, economic, industrial, government, and non-profit activities with potential for wider application of behavioral strategy. Through the ongoing release of focused topical titles, this book series will seek to disseminate theoretical insights and practical management information that will enable interested professionals to gain a rigorous and comprehensive understanding of the subject of behavioral strategy. Decision Making in Behavioral Strategy contains contributions by leading scholars in the field of behavioral strategy research. The 10 chapters in this volume cover a number of significant issues relating to the decision making processes, practices, and perspectives in the field of behavioral strategy, covering diverse topics such as failures in acquisitions, entrepreneurs under ambiguity, metacognition, neural correlates of emotion, knowledge flows, behavioral responses, business modeling, and alliance capability. The chapters include empirical as well as conceptual treatments of the selected topics, and collectively present a wide-ranging review of the noteworthy research perspectives on decision making in behavioral strategy.

This book focuses on understanding the international behaviours of SMEs, entrepreneurial ventures, and entrepreneurs. The collection of contributions gathered in the book highlights the importance of cultures, contexts and behaviours that pertain to the international entrepreneurship arena. The respective chapters address topics such as entrepreneurial cognition, international entrepreneurial ecosystems, innovation, international market entry decisions, family SMEs, international human resources management, cross-cultural and indigenous entrepreneurship, social capital and sustainability in international markets. All contributions are based on the latest empirical and theoretical research, and provide key findings and concrete recommendations for scholars, entrepreneurs, organizations and policy makers.

Since the conceptualization of bounded rationality, management scholars started investigating how people—managers and entrepreneurs—really make decisions within (and for) organizations. The aim of this eBook is to deeply investigate trends that have flourished within this pivotal research area in conceptual and/or empirical terms, trying to provide new insights on how managers and entrepreneurs make decisions within and for organizations. In this vein, readers that approach this eBook will be taken by hand and accompanied to the discovery of how the mind of decision makers is at the basis of organizational developments or failures. In this regard, published contributions in this eBook underline how executives and entrepreneurs must be ecologically rational, thus be aware of the negative and positive effects that biases can have depending on the context and use them at their advantage. Managerial and entrepreneurial decision-making are phenomena that cannot be detached from the environment in which executives and entrepreneurs are embedded, claiming to establish new approaches to research that looks at decision-making as an individual/group/organization-environment dialectical and multi-level phenomenon.