Entrepreneurs’ Over-optimism During the Early Life Course of the Firm

Zornitza Kambourova; Erik Stam

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-62009-1_15

Entrepreneurs’ Over-optimism During the Early Life Course of the Firm

Zornitza Kambourova^*, Erik Stam

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › Academic › peer-review

Abstract

Recent research on cognitive biases in decision making suggests that over-optimism critically influences entrepreneurs’ decisions to establish and sustain new firms. This paper looks at entrepreneurs’ over-optimism during the early life course of the firm, in order to uncover the dynamics and persistence of over-optimism. We use a representative sample of start-ups in the Netherlands, which we divide into solo self-employed and employer firms. We find that while there is a persistence of over-optimism for the solo self-employed, namely initial over-optimist are more likely to be overoptimistic in subsequent periods; this is not the case for the employer firms.

Original language	English
Title of host publication	Foundations of Economic Change
Publisher	Springer
Pages	333-353
Number of pages	21
ISBN (Electronic)	978-3-319-62009-1
ISBN (Print)	978-3-319-62008-4
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62009-1_15
Publication status	Published - 28 Aug 2017

Publication series

Name	Economic Complexity and Evolution
ISSN (Print)	2199-3173
ISSN (Electronic)	2199-3181

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2017, Springer International Publishing AG.

Keywords

Biases
Early life course of the firm
Entrepreneurship
Firm growth
Learning
Over-optimism
Risk-propensity

Access to Document

10.1007/978-3-319-62009-1_15

978-3-319-62009-1_15Final published version, 196 KBLicence: Taverne

Cite this

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Entrepreneurs’ Over-optimism During the Early Life Course of the Firm

Abstract

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Keywords

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