Temporal mediation of uncertainty within entrepreneurial opportunity evaluation

Abstract

Limited research within entrepreneurship is available on how time affects entrepreneurs’ decision-making. We try to bridge this gap by understanding how temporal factors affect opportunity evaluation and how they affect uncertainty. Basing our hypotheses on Construal Level Theory, we ran two experiments and found that individuals modify their evaluation of the same opportunity when evaluating a distant future versus a near future event. Opportunities in the near future are more highly evaluated than distant future opportunities. Moreover, we demonstrate experimentally that uncertainty affects opportunity evaluation.