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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.
Connecting People and Knowledge: Knowledge Spillovers, Cognitive Biases, and Entrepreneurship
(2019)
Having served under David at the Max Planck Institute in Jena, the authors witnessed first hand as he worked to build up entrepreneurship as an academic discipline. While he was building this community in the field writ-large, he was also building a strong network of entrepreneurship scholars within the team itself. While reflecting upon the benefits of cognitive biases such as optimism for entrepreneurial knowledge spillovers and demonstrating context-dependency of the benefits and drawbacks of cognitive biases, the authors also connect this to how they have experienced David’s way of developing a research network.
Competition and moral behavior: A meta-analysis of forty-five crowd-sourced experimental designs
(2023)
Does competition affect moral behavior? This fundamental question has been debated among leading scholars for centuries, and more recently, it has been tested in experimental studies yielding a body of rather inconclusive empirical evidence. A potential source of ambivalent empirical results on the same hypothesis is design heterogeneity—variation in true effect sizes across various reasonable experimental research protocols. To provide further evidence on whether competition affects moral behavior and to examine whether the generalizability of a single experimental study is jeopardized by design heterogeneity, we invited independent research teams to contribute experimental designs to a crowd-sourced project. In a large-scale online data collection, 18,123 experimental participants were randomly allocated to 45 randomly selected experimental designs out of 95 submitted designs. We find a small adverse effect of competition on moral behavior in a meta-analysis of the pooled data. The crowd-sourced design of our study allows for a clean identification and estimation of the variation in effect sizes above and beyond what could be expected due to sampling variance. We find substantial design heterogeneity—estimated to be about 1.6 times as large as the average standard error of effect size estimates of the 45 research designs—indicating that the informativeness and generalizability of results based on a single experimental design are limited. Drawing strong conclusions about the underlying hypotheses in the presence of substantive design heterogeneity requires moving toward much larger data collections on various experimental designs testing the same hypothesis.
In recent years, there has been increasing use of experimentally validated self-reported items to measure individuals' risk preferences, specifically risk aversion. While previous research supports their convergent validity, we argue that self-reported risk preference measures capture a broad spectrum of additional constructs involved in risky decision-making, notably including loss aversion as a potential confound. In broader applications, such as observational studies, associations with other constructs enhance a measurement's ability to predict risk-taking behaviors across diverse natural environments, often arising from the interplay of different constructs better captured by comprehensive self-reported measures than by narrower, construct-specific incentivized measures. Conversely, in focused tests where each construct has unique behavioral implications, using broad self-reported measures as a replacement for construct-specific incentivized measurements can result in significant endogeneity issues. By analyzing three samples from two independent studies, we demonstrate that even after accounting for incentivized risk preference measures that remove latent construct associations and focus on measurement-related confounds, self-reported risk preferences maintain a substantial association with incentivized loss aversion measures, indicating that the measurement captures a mixture of both risk and loss aversion. We also observe that the strength of associations depends on whether individuals interpret risk-taking as accepting higher variances or higher losses. Based on this finding, we propose a simple procedure that utilizes this individual heterogeneity in the confounding effect's strength to enhance the robustness of conclusions drawn from analyses of self-reported risk preference measures
Previous research examining the link between individuals’ preferences for competition and occupational choice has not taken explicitly into account how the level of competition in various occupations is perceived by individuals. In contrast, we argue that individuals’ perception of intensity of competition is of key importance for linking theoretically and empirically individual competitiveness to occupational choice, particularly entrepreneurial entry. Using two datasets, one obtained from a student sample and the other from a general population sample, we provide empirical evidence that the relationship between individual competitiveness and occupational choice is moderated by perceived intensity of competition. Moreover, entrepreneurship is, on average, perceived as more competitively intense than paid employment in both samples implying that individuals shying away from competition and at the same time perceive particularly entrepreneurship as competitively intense are more likely to select into paid employment than into entrepreneurship.
Referring to Isreal M. Kirzner (1973) and Schumpeter (1934), who emphasized the competitive nature of entrepreneurship, this study investigates whether potential and revealed entrepreneurs are more likely to seek competition 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 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 it or personal development. 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.
The ratio of index finger length to ring finger length (2D:4D) is considered to be a putative biomarker of prenatal androgen exposure (PAE), with previous research suggesting that 2D:4D is associated with human behaviors, especially sex-typical behaviors. This study empirically examines the relationship between 2D:4D and individual competitiveness, a behavioral trait that is found to be sexually dimorphic. We employ two related, but distinct, measures of competitiveness, namely behavioral measures obtained from economic experiments and psychometric self-reported measures. Our analyses are based on two independent data sets obtained from surveys and economic experiments with 461 visitors of a shopping mall (Study I) and 617 university students (Study II). The correlation between behavior in the economic experiment and digit ratios of both hands is not statistically significant in either study. In contrast, we find a negative and statistically significant relationship between psychometric self-reported measures of competitiveness and right hand digit ratios (R2D:4D) in both studies. This relationship is especially strong for younger people. Hence, this study provides some robust empirical evidence for a negative association between R2D:4D and self-reported competitiveness. We discuss potential reasons why digit ratio may relate differently to behaviors in specific economics experiments and to self-reported general competitiveness.
Economics meets psychology: Experimental and self-reported measures of individual competitiveness
(2017)
This study examines the relationship between economic and psychological approaches to measure individuals' competitiveness. While psychologists typically use self-reported psychometric scales, economists tend to use behavioral measures obtained from economic experiments, where subjects confronted with specific paid tasks have to select into either a competitive or a piece-rate payment scheme. Both measurement approaches have remained largely isolated from one another. We demonstrate that a standard behavioral measure and a psychometric scale of individual competitiveness are positively associated, but distinguishable with respect to the role of personal development motives. While self-reported competitiveness also emerges from personal development motives, the behavioral measure does not reflect such motives. The distinction between both measures is validated based on divergent associations with personality and interests in a competitive career.
While previous studies demonstrated that, in many settings, women tend to be less willing than men to engage in interpersonal competition, this study focuses on selection into self-competition. Competing against own past performances can be an integral part of life, including job and sports. Using data obtained from a lab-in-the-field experiment, we find empirical evidence that women are, on average, more reluctant than men to compete against their own past performance. Our results suggest that this difference can be mainly explained by gender differences in risk preferences.
This study examines the relationship between prenatal testosterone exposure (PTE) and selection into entrepreneurship. We argue that the relationship between PTE and entrepreneurial intent is positive and mediated by general and domain–specific risk–taking related to financial investment and professional career. Using the second–to–fourth digit ratio (2D:4D) as noninvasive retrospective marker for PTE, we identify two–step mediation effects of PTE on entrepreneurial intent through both general and domain–specific risk–taking. To account for possible socialization–based effects, we control for gender and parental self–employment. Applying ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analyses and structural equation models, we provide empirical evidence for a biological association between 2D:4D and entrepreneurial intent.
There's no fox like an old fox: Dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation and venture closure
(2023)
Only a few scholars examined downsides of EO and suggest it may negatively affect survival. Previous research, which mainly focuses on mature companies, assumes that the relationship between EO and survival is constant. However, because firm characteristics and causal mechanisms change as young venture survive and grow into mature firms, the relationships between EO and survival could also change over time. We extend the EO literature by considering changing EO effects when venture grow into mature firms and by employing a multidimensional view on EO and identify isolating independent mechanisms for the influence of each dimension (i.e. innovativeness, proactiveness and risk-taking) on the survival of young ventures. While the nature of proactiveness on performance is rathe positive, risk-taking and innovativeness increases the variance of firm performance and thus the chances of failure. However, the latter can be separated according to whether the increase in variance occurs at a single point in time (risk-taking) or over time (innovation) and whether the survivors have more money or more innovations. For young firms, innovativeness and risk-taking inhibit survival, while proactiveness promotes it, so the dimensions have divergent effects. As a consequence of the attrition of young ventures, the associations of innovativeness and risk-taking reverse when they grow older. Our empirical analyses are based on panel data of 8,518 young firms.
More attention must be paid to the multidimensional nature of competitiveness to better understand how competitiveness relates to personality and gender. We focus on three dimensions: Desire to Win (DW), Personal Development competitiveness (PD), and Enjoyment of Competition (EC). Our empirical exploratory analysis is based on a large sample of 1520 individuals. We control for interdimensional correlations, correct for multiple testing, and use conservative thresholds to provide robust evidence on dimension-specific associations of competitiveness with personality, operationalized via the HEXACO framework, and gender. Independent of the respectively other competitiveness dimensions, DW relates to less honesty-humility and less agreeableness, PD to more emotionality, and EC to more extraversion and less emotionality. EC is the sole source of gender differences among the correlated competitiveness dimensions.