1. INTUITIVE DECISION MAKING
AND USE OF HEURISTICS IN
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
EDUCATION
Rodica Ianole
Viorel Cornescu
University of Bucharest
Faculty of Business and Administration

2. CONTEXT
20.11.12
 The creative dominant trait of entrepreneurs is
commonly associated with a more flexible process
of decision-making
 The behavioral economics literature on cognitive
biases and heuristics explores in depth the
decisional mechanisms and intuitive shortcuts
within the entrepreneurial behavioral
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3. SCOPE
20.11.12
 Entrepreneurial decisions are inclined to be more
susceptible to certain biases and heuristics,
compared to the adherence to the framework of
rational decision-making?
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4. SPECIFIC FOCUS OF OUR
RESEARCH
20.11.12
 Students preparing to become potential future
entrepreneurs (study profile – Business
Administration)
 Critical thinking upon different decision theory
problems.
 Method: content analysis of their framing and
some arguments for certainty, risk and
uncertainty environmental conditions.
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5. CONTENT ANALYSIS
20.11.12
 The sample 161 undergraduate Business
Administration students, in their second year of
study, split in two series of 78 and respectively 83
students.
 The „experimental” frame through which we have
collected the data was represented by their final
examination at the discipline Decision Theory
 The first section of the exam consisted in five open
questions regarding particular situations and their
characterization in terms of decisional environments,
normative and descriptive models of decision, types of
decision, rationality and types of utility. 5

6. 20.11.12
 The question was asking the students to explain
if the decision presented through a particular
affirmation was a decision under certainty, under
risk or under uncertainty.
1. You decide to buy a lottery ticket for the extraction
that will take place next week
2. You decide to apply for a master program in
corporative finances at a US top university
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7. RESULTS
20.11.12
 First question: 55,12% of the students have coined the
right answer of risky environment (43 papers),
23,07% have inclined towards uncertainty (18 papers)
and 17, 94% stated certainty (14 papers); there were
also three blank answers.
 Second question: 30,14% (25 papers) of the students
have recognized the right answer of uncertainty in
terms of two possible main results, being accepted or
not, but without the possibility of associating a
specific probability value. 57,83% of students stated
certainty and a very small slice of 1% stated risk,
admitting there is a probability of not being accepted. 7

8. DISCUSSION
20.11.12
 Only from this incipient part of the analysis, we can
notice that intuitive thinking is a strong resort when
making decisions.
 We can postulate that this type of intuition is formed
on the standard premises of economic knowledge,
triggering some automatic responses and leaving too
little space to a proper analysis of a problem in terms
of individual and the environment.
 The overconfidence bias, along with the status-quo
may partially explain these preliminary results.
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9. LIMITATIONS
20.11.12
 Locus of control - it might be that the groups that
chose “certainty” might have gone for this answer
because they focused strictly on what they can
control and beyond that the world is “given”.
 Methodological issues - the association with the
three types of decision environment can be
detrimental in the long-run because it focuses too
much on the idea that the student answering the
questions actually know what the three
environments actually entail.
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