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The purpose of this paper is to study how individuals assess responsibility during an uncontrollable event requiring collective action, using crises affecting service workers as contexts. Specifically, the authors examine what parties consumers hold responsible for ensuring service worker welfare following an uncontrollable event and determine what factors make customers more open to accepting responsibility for ensuring worker welfare themselves.

The authors surveyed a nationally representative sample of US consumers regarding their attitudes toward protecting service workers during COVID-19 and used regression analysis to identify factors that predict attributions of responsibility to customers. The authors also conducted an experiment (using a new crisis context) to determine whether certain key factors impact customer perceptions of their own responsibility for helping employees during an uncontrollable event.

The survey results show US consumers hold firms most responsible for worker welfare, followed by customers and, finally, government. When examining factors that drive attributions of responsibility for customers, perceptions of how sincere firms are in their efforts to help employees predict higher responsibility attributions, and experimental results confirm that higher perceived firm sincerity increases consumers’ own sense of responsibility toward workers.

This research identifies factors that affect consumer support for efforts to help service employees and collective action problems more generally.

This research highlights an under-studied crisis context – uncontrollable events that require collective action – and shows how consumers make assessments about their own responsibility (in addition to the responsibility of the service firm) in these contexts.

The pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities is not always successful. On the one hand, entrepreneurial failure offers an invaluable opportunity for entrepreneurs to learn about their ventures and themselves. On the other hand, entrepreneurial failure is associated with substantial financial, psychological, and social costs. When entrepreneurs fail to learn from failure, the potential value of this experience is not fully utilized and these costs will have been incurred in vain. In this chapter, the authors investigate how the stigma of failure exacerbates the various costs of failure, thereby making learning from failure much more difficult. The authors combine an analysis of interviews of 20 entrepreneurs (who had, at the time of interview, experienced failure) with an examination of archival data reflecting the legal and cultural environment around their ventures. The authors find that stigma worsens the entrepreneurs’ experience of failure, hinders their transformation of failure experience, and eventually prevents them from utilizing the lessons learnt from failure in their future entrepreneurial activities. The authors discuss the implications of the findings for the entrepreneurship research and economic policies.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the effectiveness of systems for ensuring cooperation in online transactions is impacted by a positivity bias in the evaluation of the work that is produced. The presence of this bias can reduce the informativeness of the reputation system and negatively impact its ability to ensure quality.

This research combines survey and experimental methods, collecting data from 1,875 Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers in five studies designed to investigate the informativeness of the MTurk reputation system.

The findings demonstrate the presence of a positivity bias in evaluations of workers on MTurk, which leaves them undifferentiated, except at the extremity of the reputation system and by status markers.

Because MTurk workers self-select tasks, the findings are limited in that they may only be generalizable to those who are interested in research-related work. Further, the tasks used in this research are largely subjective in nature, which may decrease their sensitivity to differences in quality.

For researchers, the results suggest that requiring 99 per cent approval rates (rather than the previously advised 95 per cent) should be used to identify high-quality workers on MTurk.

The research provides insights into the design and use of reputation systems and demonstrates how design decisions can exacerbate the effect of naturally occurring biases in evaluations to reduce the utility of these systems.

In order to answer which opportunities are better to pursue, the purpose of this paper is to propose and empirically test a decision-making model for evaluating and selecting entrepreneurial opportunities.

First, the authors identified common evaluation criteria through a systematic review of 45 high quality articles published in top entrepreneurship and management journals between 2000 and 2017. Second, fuzzy screening technique has been employed to offer the decision-making model. Third, the authors used data of six evaluations provided by five experts at a medium-sized biotech firm to test the model.

The study shows that common decision criteria for evaluating entrepreneurial opportunities fall into seven categories. According to these criteria and using fuzzy screening technique, a multi-expert multi-criteria decision-making (ME–MCDM) model has been suggested for evaluating and selecting opportunities.

This model can be served in situations in which decision makers should select a small number of opportunities among the larger set with regard to opportunity profile and minimal information. More opportunities and more decision makers can be included in the model. When the number of opportunities and decision makers are high, it is possible to use programming for fast, accurate and easy calculation.

This study is the first systematic review of opportunity evaluation criteria. It is also the first considering opportunity evaluation as a multi-expert decision-making process.

High-stake crime investigations include cases such as murder and rape. The purpose of this paper is to outline the components of an interview strategy for suspects. In the UK, these interviews are often managed by Interview Managers who are tasked with developing effective interview strategies with the aim of ensuring all parties involved in the interview process are dealt with ethically and legally using research-based methods.

This practitioner paper is based on the experience of the authors who have provided advice and support during high-stake crime investigations both nationally and internationally using the research-base to underpin their practical advice.

To be effective, a suspect strategy constructed by an Interview Manager in high-stake crime investigations should be designed within a framework that covers the provision of strategic advice on research-based interview processes including: co-ordination of the interview process, monitoring of the interview process and evaluation of the interview process.

To ensure interviews are effectively managed during high-stake crime investigations, the suspect interview strategy must be developed to a professional standard to allow for quality assurance and outside scrutiny.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first published paper that outlines the nature of a suspect strategy that is based on a Framework consistent with elements of the UK National Occupational Standards.

Entrepreneurship research has paid little attention to variance in entrepreneurial opportunities, instead choosing to treat them as homogenous. Thus, the field has failed to acknowledge that there are significant variations in means–ends conceptualizations giving rise to different types of opportunities. Further, researchers and educators have not fully considered that the type of opportunity being pursued has implications for which entrepreneurial actions are required to realize a successful outcome. We address these issues in this chapter by distinguishing means–ends combinations such that four types of opportunities – replication, reinterpretation, revelation, and revolution – are introduced. This matrix leads to propositions regarding differing actions that would be emphasized as a function of the type opportunity under consideration (e.g., legitimacy building, knowledge assimilation, market demand, and resource acquisition). The net effect is an improved understanding of how variations in means–ends conceptualizations influence how entrepreneurs interpret their particular opportunity, which in turn drives the actions they take as they attempt to turn their vision into reality. This improved understanding has important implications for entrepreneurship education and we suggests a number of possible changes to pedagogy that flow from our framework. We believe that these changes will bring added richness and value to the classroom.

This chapter is designed to outline how current methods in formal policy analysis have evolved to better respect limits to an analyst's knowledge. These limits are referred to as model uncertainty both in order to capture the idea that formal policy analysis is predicated on mathematically precise formulations that embody assumptions on the part of an analyst and because model uncertainty, which represents a recognition of the potential for these assumptions to produce unsound analyses, has been an active area of research in economics and statistics for the last 15 or so years. The argumentation in this chapter is not original and is admittedly selective. For Austrian economists, the paper will hopefully be of interest in indicating how empirical work is evolving in a way that better respects limits to a social scientist's knowledge. I certainly do not mean to suggest that these arguments should eliminate the objections that have been raised by some Austrian economists to formal empirical work. Rather, the intent of this chapter is to indicate the possibility of dialog and debate between Austrian and non-Austrian economists on the role of formal empirical work. In several contexts, I have introduced arguments concerning the limits of formal econometric analysis by Hayek and von Mises to both illustrate how the perspectives in this chapter relate to their views in order to suggest why, in my judgment, some of their skepticism is unwarranted.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate effects of policy initiatives on entrepreneurs’ opportunity evaluation decisions.

Factors were selected from real world policy initiatives. The model pricing power as a traditional economic base rate attribute and then considering how variance in use fees and reporting requirements changes the base rate relationship. The factors served as decision attributes in a conjoint analysis experiment. A total of 126 entrepreneurs made 2,268 opportunity evaluation decisions.

While increases in pricing power result in a positive upward base rate opportunity evaluation, government mandated use fees and reporting requirements diminish the base rate toward the negative. This suggest that that even though the likely profits are much higher with the significant pricing power opportunity, entrepreneurs heavily discount these opportunities because they view the combination of economic costs of paying high use fees and the non-pecuniary costs of reporting requirements as unappealing. Further, the authors find entrepreneurs’ disproportionately discount higher margin opportunities when the regulatory burden is higher revealing the importance of policy factors in new product introduction decisions.

Policy has traditionally focussed on the macro-level effects of initiatives and how they directly affect issues like economic growth. This study reveals that this is only part of the equation because changes in government policy impact entrepreneurs’ opportunity evaluation decisions that underpin macro trends. In order to be effective, policy makers need to pay greater attention to not only the economic, but also the non-pecuniary costs that policy changes evoke. This is especially true for those policies like reporting requirements that may be perceived as threats to entrepreneurs’ sense of autonomy.

This research brings to the foreground the relationship between the policy environment and the cognitions and decision of individual entrepreneurs whose collective actions move the economy. The net effect is new insight regarding how policy factors coalesce to influence entrepreneurs’ assessments of opportunities, often in ways that negatively affect these assessments beyond what simple economic calculations would suggest.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a better understanding of how the interplay of individual-level resources and culture affects entrepreneurs’ propensity to adopt social value creation goals.

Using a sample of 12,685 entrepreneurs in 35 countries from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, it investigates the main effects of individual-level resources – measured as financial, human and social capital – on social value creation goals, as well as the moderating effects of the cultural context in which the respective entrepreneur is embedded, on the relationship between individual-level resources and social value creation goals.

Drawing on the resource-based perspective and Hofstede’s cultural values framework, the results offer empirical evidence that individual-level resources are relevant for predicting the extent to which entrepreneurs emphasise social goals for their business. Furthermore, culture influences the way entrepreneurs allocate their resources towards social value creation.

The study sheds new light on how entrepreneurs’ individual resources influence their willingness to create social value. Moreover, by focussing on the role of culture in the relationship between individual-level resources and social value creation goals, it contributes to social entrepreneurship literature, which has devoted little attention to the interplay of individual characteristics and culture.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between inventory leanness and venture survival, and demonstrate the role of organizational environments in moderating this relationship from three dimensions: environmental complexity, dynamism and munificence.

Using a large panel data of more than 150,000 new Chinese small- and medium-sized enterprises between 2000 and 2007 in the manufacturing sector, the authors employ the method of survival analysis via an accelerated failure time model to explore the non-linear relationship between inventory leanness and the likelihood of survival. Moreover, the moderation model is applied to examine the moderating role of organizational environments.

At its core, this paper demonstrates the inverted U-shaped relationship between inventory leanness and the likelihood of survival. Furthermore, the authors find that environmental complexity and dynamism can negatively moderate this relationship, whereas environmental munificence acts the exact opposite.

Managers need to realize the trade-off between inventory leanness and venture survival. Collectively, more than 90 percent of new Chinese ventures have great potential to improve the likelihood of survival by implementing inventory leanness management. In addition, firms ought to be fully aware of the internal management and the external environments.

This is the first study to confirm the inverted U-shaped relationship between inventory leanness and the likelihood of survival, and empirically verify the moderating role of environmental complexity, dynamism and munificence on this relationship.