Personality traits, subjective learning, and entrepreneurial decision making

Alexander Konon

VfS Annual Conference 2015 (Muenster): Economic Development - Theory and Policy from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: We present a dynamic occupational choice model with a learning algorithm simultaneously capable to explain entrepreneurial entry, exit, and survival. According to our model, those individuals decide to become entrepreneurs who expect their productivity to be highest when managed by themselves. As we further assume that individuals have incomplete information about their own non-cognitive skills, which are relevant for entrepreneurial processes, entrepreneurial entry in our model is driven by overconfidence in the own skills---in line with earlier empirical findings. After entry, entrepreneurs receive noisy feedback from the market. Depending on a set of traits different from those driving the entry process into the market, entrepreneurs decide to either stay or leave the market. Our learning-based model generates survival rates decreasing at decreasing rates and captures findings on the earnings puzzle according to which median entrepreneurs do not earn more than median wage workers.

JEL-codes: D83 L22 L26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent and nep-ino
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1) Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/112805/1/VfS_2015_pid_615.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:vfsc15:112805

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in VfS Annual Conference 2015 (Muenster): Economic Development - Theory and Policy from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().