TY - GEN A1 - Urbig, Diemo A1 - Bönte, Werner A1 - Procher, Vivien D. A1 - Lombardo, Sandro T1 - Entrepreneurs Embrace Competition: Evidence from a Lab-in-the-Field Study T2 - Academy of Management Proceedings N2 - Referring to Isreal M. Kirzner (1973) and Joseph A. Schumpeter (1934), who emphasized the competitive nature of entrepreneurship, this study investigates whether entrepreneurs are more competitive than non-entrepreneurs. We provide a conceptual framework that links entrepreneurship to three facets of individual competitiveness drawn from economic, entrepreneurship, and psychological research: a desire to win, striving for personal development, and an enjoyment of competition. Following recent economic research linking competitive behavior in experiments to career choices, we conduct a lab-in-the-field study and demonstrate that entrepreneurs are more likely to enter competitions than non-entrepreneurs. Accounting for individual desires to win and mastery-related achievement motivations, our results indicate that entrepreneurs tend to enter competition for the sake of competition itself rather than for the prospect of winning a competition or personal development in competition. Our results suggest that enjoyment of competition might be an additional factor driving entrepreneurs’ market entry decisions beyond well-known factors like overconfidence and risk taking. KW - Entrepreneurship KW - individual competitiveness KW - experiment Y1 - 2021 UR - https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-UBICO/frontdoor/index/index/docId/27155 VL - 2019 IS - 1 ER -