Download or read book Three Essays on Entrepreneurial Decision Making and Financial Resource Acquisition written by Emily M. Neubert and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the first challenges entrepreneurs encounter when starting a venture is obtaining initial resources. Many entrepreneurs do not have access to professional investors and, as a result, must turn to their own social networks to secure early-stage financing to advance their ventures. To date, most of the decision-making research on financial resource acquisition has focused on investors' decision making by examining biases and factors that impact who they invest in, but this dissertation investigates the other side of the investor-entrepreneur exchange relationship to understand how entrepreneurs' decisions are impacted by the characteristics of potential and current investors. In the first essay, I present a conceptual model theorizing how relational ties to investors as well as the perceived financial resilience and perceived expertise of investors influence entrepreneurs' decisions to seek resources from individuals and later, influence how entrepreneurs use those funds to further their ventures. In the second and third essays, I empirically test portions of the conceptual model by analyzing entrepreneurs' decisions as they evaluate potential investors and make resource allocation decisions. Collectively, the three essays in my dissertation aim to enhance the field's understanding of entrepreneurial decision making during resource mobilization and deployment. Through this dissertation, I introduce and investigate the notion of "funding source bias", which sheds light on how investor characteristics influence and potentially bias entrepreneurial decision making.