We use a sample of 18 countries to study what variables have a significant impact on an individual’s decision to start a new business and classification and regression trees for an accurate interpretation of the data. Our results support existing literature suggesting the existence of strong...

We show how individual strategies in market entry games depend on randomly induced prior outcomes and on the competitors' beliefs about reference dependence in risk taking. On average, competitors take greater risk the lower their own outcome is and the greater the outcomes among their...

Decision making in an entrepreneurial context is explored using theoretical and experimental analysis. How individuals use their leisure and work time and how they distribute their work time between their regular wage job and a new venture is also investigated. Data were acquired from two...

Across countries, women own significantly fewer businesses than do men. We show that this is due, in large part, to the fact that the propensity to start businesses of women is significantly lower than that of men. The lower propensity of women, in turn, appears to be highly correlated to...

This paper is the first to conduct an incentive-compatible experiment using real monetary payoffs to test the hypothesis of probabilistic insurance which states that willingness to pay for insurance decreases sharply in the presence of even small default probabilities as compared to a risk-free...