Chapter 6: Conjoint Analysis: A Window of Opportunity for Entrepreneurship Research

To date, much of the decision making research within the entrepreneurship domain has relied on post hoc methodologies. In other words, researchers have used questionnaires, surveys and interviews to query the entrepreneur, venture capitalist, angel, and so forth on how they made various decisions. While insightful and undoubtedly advancing the field, Huber and Power (1985) and Golden (1992) propose that retrospective reports provide data that have errors and biases due to respondents’ motivation to bias the results (Cannell & Henson, 1974; March & Feldman, 1981), perceptual and cognitive limitations (Duncan, 1979; Fischhoff, 1982; March & Simon, 1958; Nisbett & Ross, 1980), lack of crucial information about the event of interest (Phillips, 1981), and variability depending on elicitation technique used. This has the effect of possibly confounding reported results.