Emotions and learning in new venture team decision-making

Understanding how new venture teams make decisions relating to opportunity evaluation and exploitation is fundamental for entrepreneurship research.
Key factors that influence entrepreneurial opportunity decisions in teams are emotions and related cognitive processes (i.e. entrepreneurial learning). But, even if emotions are acknowledged as a central element of the entrepreneurial process, the emotion-cognition-decision-making link is still underexplored. This research project aims to fill this gap by investigating the effect of emotions and entrepreneurial learning in evaluation and exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities in new venture teams. A lack of longitudinal and experimental data causes a scarcity of empirical studies in this field. In this project we combine a laboratory experiment with Event Sampling Methodology to track emotions, learning and decision-making over time. The topic of the project is relevant for both theory and practice: further investigation will help create an understanding of causalities in entrepreneurial decision-making in teams. Moreover, a better understanding of entrepreneurial team decision-making will improve the success-rates of new businesses.