 The Role of Entrepreneurs’ Perceived Competence and Cooperativeness in Early-Stage FinancingMojca Svetek Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 2023, vol. 47, issue 6, 2047-2076 Abstract: Building on social-psychological insights into social perception and judgment and empirical findings from the entrepreneurship literature, we propose that early-stage equity investors look at two main dimensions to assess entrepreneurs seeking early-stage financing: competence and cooperativeness. In all, 84 angel investors and venture capitalists active in Europe participated in a conjoint experiment. The results show that investors prioritize entrepreneurs’ competence over their cooperativeness. Entrepreneurs’ competence is even more appealing to investors when combined with coachability. We find that entrepreneurs can compensate for a lack of experience by demonstrating solid market knowledge and appearing to be coachable. Furthermore, the results suggest that investors differ in their consideration of entrepreneurs’ cooperativeness, but not competence, when making investment decisions—a finding that is conditional on investors’ usual level of involvement in their portfolio ventures. We discuss these findings from a theoretical and practical perspective. Keywords: competence; cooperation; social cognition; venture capital; angel investing; investment decision-making; value-adding behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:entthe:v:47:y:2023:i:6:p:2047-2076 DOI: 10.1177/10422587221127000 Access Statistics for this article More articles in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice |
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