Dan Kai Hsu’s scientific contributions

Drawing on the psychological ownership (PO) literature, this paper identifies the antecedents of the entrepreneur’s grief and grieving mechanisms after business failure. Surveying 150 entrepreneurs with previous business failure experience on Amazon Mechanical Turk, we demonstrated that entrepreneurs with strong PO feelings toward their ventures are likely to experience greater grief after business failure. However, our results indicate that not all types of PO feelings increase grief after business failure. Whereas entrepreneurs’ promotive PO feelings are positively related to grief, preventative PO reduces the felt levels of grief after business failure. Moreover, our results showed that entrepreneurs’ type and strength of PO toward their ventures determines the grieving mechanism that they use to recover from business failure. Whereas entrepreneurs with a high level of promotive PO are likely to recover from business failure by either shifting their attention to other alternatives (restoration orientation) or work through the loss of their business intensively (loss orientation) entrepreneurs with preventative PO switch between shifting their attention to other alternatives and working through the loss (oscillation orientation). It appears that the way the failed entrepreneurs recover from failure would be significantly influenced by the type of PO (promotive vs. preventative) they have before business failure.

The intention to become a serial entrepreneur can be influenced by both situational and dispositional factors. Considerable emphasis in this literature has focused on the situational factors such as prior business successes and failures. In this paper, we integrate theoretical and empirical research on serial entrepreneurship with regulatory focus theory to determine whether dispositional regulatory orientation predicts serial entrepreneurship intentions, and how those dispositional orientations are influenced by situational cues. We conducted an experimental study of 74 experienced entrepreneurs to test our proposed relationships. Our results indicate that a negative relationship between dispositional prevention focus and serial entrepreneurship intentions is strengthened following our experimental manipulation of business failures. Conversely, we also found a positive relationship between dispositional promotion focus and serial entrepreneurship intentions with no significant effects from success or failure feedback.