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.
CITATION STYLE
Kambourova, Z., & Stam, E. (2017). Entrepreneurs’ Over-optimism During the Early Life Course of the Firm. In Economic Complexity and Evolution (pp. 333–353). Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62009-1_15
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