Time: 11:00-13:00, 30 June 2025
Speaker: Dr. Xi Chen received her PhD in management from the Stern School of Business, New York University. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Management and Organizations at the School of Business, MacEwan University, and will soon join the University of Guelph. Her research focuses on how entrepreneurs and employees construct and adapt to change, with particular attention to the role of identity and self-perception. Her work has been published in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, Journal of Business Research, and Management and Organization Review.
Abstract:
Crises such as pandemics or wars bring deep uncertainty to entrepreneurs. Prior research has mainly found that uncertainty has a negative effect on entrepreneurial activity. This paper examines whether crisis-induced uncertainty can positively affect entrepreneurial intentions through overconfidence. The authors argue that uncertainty and difficulty in predicting world developments during crises create cognitive dissonance among entrepreneurs, which may increase confidence in their own knowledge and lead to overconfidence. An experiment with 106 entrepreneurs in Greater China during the COVID-19 pandemic and a survey of 224 entrepreneurs in Eastern Europe both show that uncertainty intensifies overconfidence, which is further associated with intentions to continue existing businesses and enter new businesses. In addition, a difference-in-differences analysis of 40,320 business-entry actions by 1,671 new ventures before and after the pandemic shows that these firms were more likely to enter unrelated business domains after the pandemic. The study offers important implications for understanding the contextual antecedents of overconfidence and how overconfidence operates in response to crisis-induced uncertainty.
