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A major source of failure for new ventures is the entrepreneurs℉ misunderstanding of the product-market fit. Recently, researchers have suggested that to get a better understanding of the product-market fit, entrepreneurs should “get out of the building” and interview many customers. This approach, while advantageous, is not without drawbacks. This article presents a conceptual model that incorporates the characteristics of “getting out of the building” to conduct customer interviews, and the biases that can arise to influence the entrepreneurs℉ misjudgment of the product-market fit. We provide recommendations to overcome these biases.

This study furthers the body of knowledge on entrepreneurial decision-making, entrepreneurial marketing and female entrepreneurs by exploring practical implications of heuristics and biases in female entrepreneurs’ marketing decisions. Heuristics and biases influence many entrepreneurial decisions. Moreover, some of the most important entrepreneurial decisions are marketing-related. Given that the entrepreneurial marketing behavior emanates from entrepreneurial thinking and decision-making, one may conclude that female entrepreneurs’ marketing decisions are susceptible to heuristics and biases. This paper aims to explore the outcomes of heuristics and biases in entrepreneurial marketing decisions.

Data were collected by conducting semi-structured interviews with 19 Iranian female biotech entrepreneurs and analyzed by thematic analysis.

The findings indicate that introducing pioneering products to the market, overestimating product’s market appeal, unprepared entry, underestimating the competition, overcoming entry impediments, entry postponement, growth, success in incremental innovation and failure in radical innovation are the main outcomes of the identified heuristics and biases in the female entrepreneurs’ marketing decisions.

This paper has some precious practical implications for marketers as well as female entrepreneurs running small businesses. Generally speaking, reducing the negative impacts of the identified heuristics and biases of this study while enhancing their positive effects will increase the chances of female entrepreneurs to compete and succeed in tumultuous markets. Furthermore, our most important managerial implication is regarding overconfidence, which was very common in the female entrepreneurs’ marketing decisions by having various positive and negative outcomes. Thus, female entrepreneurs should be careful of this fateful bias in their decisions by knowing the most common signs of overconfidence.

This paper is unique because of not only identifying the main heuristics and biases but also their major outcomes in entrepreneurs’ major marketing decisions. Moreover, this paper is a pioneer in exploring heuristics and biases in female entrepreneurs’ decisions.

Although heuristics and biases seal the fate of entrepreneurial enterprises by directly influencing entrepreneurs’ decisions, previous studies have ignored the role of gender in this regard by considering female and male entrepreneurs homogeneous in their susceptibility to heuristics and biases. Thus, this paper aims to advance the existing body of knowledge on heuristics and biases in the field of entrepreneurship by exploring two heuristics of affect and representativeness as well as three biases of overconfidence, escalation of commitment and illusion of control in female and male entrepreneurs’ entry and opportunity-related decisions.

The data were gathered through semi-structured and in-depth interviews with ten male and nine female Iranian techno-entrepreneurs active in advanced medicine and biotechnology. The gathered data were analyzed by thematic and narrative data analysis.

According to the results, while both male and female entrepreneurs show certain heuristics and biases, there are some noteworthy distinctions. More precisely, contrary to their male counterparts, the female entrepreneurs neither rely on the representativeness heuristic nor show any signs of the escalation of commitment in their decisions.

There are some valuable implications emanated from this study which could be of use for not only future researchers but also entrepreneurs, especially the ones founding and running small businesses themselves.

While there is a strong body of literature on heuristics and biases in the field of entrepreneurship, previous studies have considered female and male entrepreneurs homogeneous in their proneness to heuristics and biases. Thus, the current study enriches the body of knowledge by being the first comparative study of heuristics and biases in female and male entrepreneurs’ decisions.

Decision-making biases play decisive roles not only in entrepreneurs’ decisions but also in the fate of entrepreneurial businesses. While the extant literature in this regard is relatively rich, it has predominantly focused on certain biases like overconfidence and overoptimism at the expense of other possibly influential biases, which could influence entrepreneurial decisions. Thus, to address this serious research gap, this paper aims to explore four of the less-researched biases of escalation of commitment, the illusion of control, confirmation and the belief in the law of small numbers in entrepreneurial decisions.

By taking a qualitative approach, the data for this study were collected through face-to-face interviews with 19 Iranian habitual (experienced) entrepreneurs running small businesses and analyzed by a qualitative thematic analysis.

According to the results, the environmental uncertainty, the reluctance to lose face and the experiences of previous failures contributed to the escalation of commitment, while disregard for external factors beyond one’s control caused the illusion of control, factors like prior successful businesses in the same sector, looking for resorts to manage uncertainty, along with the decision to exploit opportunities resulted in the confirmation bias, while the expenses of conducting sweeping pilot tests in the market and the reluctance to reveal a business secret to the competitors were the main contributors of the belief in the law of small numbers.

This study is a pioneer in scrutinizing four less-researched but important biases in entrepreneurs and, thus extending the line of research in this regard.

This empirical study examined links between entrepreneurial personality traits and perception of new venture opportunity in a sample of 207 respondents. Four entrepreneurial personality traits were included to predict respondents℉ perception of new venture opportunity. They are (1) achievement motivation, (2) locus of control, (3) risk propensity, and (4) proactivity.The results of multiple regression analysis show that three of the four entrepreneurial personality traits‐locus of control, risk propensity, and proactivity‐related significantly to perception of new venture opportunity in expected directions. Among the three personality traits, proactivity was found to have the strongest influence over entrepreneurial perception. No significant relationship was found between achievement motivation and perception of new venture opportunity. Among six control variables, only work experience was found to influence perception of new venture opportunity. This study explored links between entrepreneurial personalities and cognition and its results suggest that a combination of trait and cognition approaches contributes to a better understanding of entrepreneurial decision-making process. Both theoretical and practical implications were discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a model suggesting that innovation may act as a motivating force that increases entrepreneurs’ growth expectations, in which entrepreneurs’ growth expectations are shaped by their subjective values and entrepreneurial experience moderates this relationship.

This paper conducts statistical analysis on a sample of 11,579 entrepreneurs from 24 countries who participated in the IIIP survey of innovation in 2011 under the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor project.

The results suggest that entrepreneurs involved in innovative entrepreneurship are more likely to have higher growth expectations, with subjective values playing a direct and indirect role in entrepreneurs’ expectations of firm growth. Additionally, the results indicate that the duration of entrepreneurial experience moderates the relationship between strategic orientation and confidence in innovation. This finding suggests there is feedback between having beliefs about the benefits of innovation and being an innovative entrepreneur, resulting in an over-estimation – at least in comparative terms – regarding firm growth rates. This relationship is stronger for novice entrepreneurs since experienced entrepreneurs tend to be more cautious about their expectations of growing.

This study deepens our understanding of the complex processes through which organizational-level decisions ultimately influence individual-level factors. The present findings contribute to progress in this task by suggesting that strategies aimed at cultivating innovation feed entrepreneurs’ subjective values of innovation as well as expectations of growth. Although the duration of entrepreneurial experience moderates the relationship between acting as an innovative entrepreneur and subjective values of innovation, the results suggest that entrepreneurs’ expectations are primarily driven by their internal perceptions of reality.

Behavioural activation is a contemporary behavioural treatment for depression that has the potential advantages of being more readily adopted in psychiatric inpatient environments than more complex psychological treatment approaches and requiring less intensive training than these approaches. In this article the theoretical and empirical foundations of behavioural activation are described along with an outline of the therapeutic process and key interventions used. Consideration is then given to factors influencing the implementation of BA in psychiatric inpatient environments.

In this study we confirm the often assumed but largely untested belief that entrepreneurs think and behave differently than others. We examine a group of more than 700 nascent entrepreneurs and 400 nonentrepreneurs. We determine the entrepreneurs’ cognitive style propensity for problem solving (Innovator versus Adaptor); we compare their expectations; and, we examine the outcomes (performance and start-up) of their ventures. We find that nascent entrepreneurs are more likely to be overly optimistic Innovators, most people are Adaptors, and oneʼs cognitive style can indeed play a role in the initial development and outcome for the venture, but not always as expected.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and validate a model of how cognitive biases and framing effects influence managerial decision‐making about strategic initiatives.

Because the author was interested in understanding real‐world practices about strategic decisions, he chose to conduct a quasi‐experimental field study over a three‐year period with managers in a multinational corporation. He developed a questionnaire and a series of vignettes for the independent measures, and examined database records of decisions for the dependent measures.

After validating the instrument items, the author conducted a confirmatory factor analysis for model fit, and then tested the model's predictive ability and interactions. The model indicated that risk aversion, overconfidence, anchoring, and expected utility affected commitment decisions, and these factors interacted with framing effects.

Decision‐makers often fall victim to biases and make sub‐optimal decisions, especially regarding long‐term strategic initiatives. To illustrate, some managers may continue to invest in initiatives that have little or no hope of succeeding because they have already invested heavily in them, or they may prematurely terminate them. An explanatory model is helpful to management and organizational developers to learn how to make optimal decisions using normative rules.

While some studies have found that cognitive biases are detrimental to entrepreneurial performance, others have conjectured that cognitive biases may stimulate entrepreneurial action. This study uses a typology of availability and representative heuristics to examine how two patterns of biases affect entrepreneurial performance. Drawing on ideas from cognitive science, this study predicts that various levels of biases in each pattern stimulate entrepreneurial behavior and performance.

A profile-deviation approach was employed to analyze data from 253 entrepreneurs and zero-truncated Poisson regression and the zero-truncated negative binomial regression to test hypotheses.

This study finds some positive associations between a particular level of cognitive biases in each of the two patterns and entrepreneurial behavior and performance. Results show that the patterns of biases often stimulate and never hurt entrepreneurial behavior and performance. The opposite holds for a lack of cognitive biases, which hurts and never stimulates entrepreneurial behavior and performance.

This study examines patterns of cognitive biases of entrepreneurs instead of single biases. The study broadens the perspective on the heuristics and cognitive biases of entrepreneurs by examining patterns of biases emanating from the availability and the representativeness heuristic that make a difference for entrepreneurial behavior and performance. The study also brings the “great rationality debate” closer to the entrepreneurship field by showing that a normative rule based on statistics and probability theory does not benefit entrepreneurial behavior and performance.