This paper seeks to address the question of “why some people choose to be an entrepreneur?” It offers a novel perspective in the strand of cognitive models to examine the formation of entrepreneurial intention.
Data for this research came from a questionnaire survey of university students in Shanghai, Zhejiang and Hubei provinces. The conceptual model is tested using the method of structural equation modelling on a sample of 415 university students.
The research confirms that perceived benefits of entrepreneurship have positive and statistically significant effects on perceived value of entrepreneurship and that perceived sacrifices of entrepreneurship in terms of non‐economic sacrifices have negative and statistically significant effects on perceived value of entrepreneurship.
The paper proposes a new construct of perceived value of entrepreneurship to explain the formation of entrepreneurial intention. Building on the concept of value perception from the marketing literature, it conceptualized the perceived value of entrepreneurship in benefit‐sacrifice components and empirically tested the argument that entrepreneurship‐related career decision making is a cognitive process in which entrepreneurial intention results from a cognitive trade‐off between perceived benefits and perceived sacrifices.
