2026 Theses Doctoral

Essays on Entrepreneurial Psychology

Freiberg, Brandon M.

Entrepreneurial strategy research increasingly recognizes that founders represent a critical source of variation in startup outcomes. As a consequence, a growing body of work examines how enduring psychological traits such as risk tolerance, optimism, and emotional stability shape entrepreneurial behavior and venture performance. However, empirical evidence on the role of founder psychology remains mixed, attributing inconsistencies to methodological challenges in measuring psychological traits among entrepreneurs, including small survey samples, nonresponse bias, and the difficulty of measuring traits prior to venture outcomes.

This dissertation leverages a new approach for studying entrepreneurial psychology using digital behavioral data. I combine machine learning models trained on survey and social media data with large language models to infer validated psychological traits from the pre-founding digital traces of more than 21,000 entrepreneurs. These measures are linked to data on strategic decision-making such as entrepreneurial entry and startup differentiation, performance outcomes such as acquisition and initial public offering (IPO), and environmental conditions at the time of founding.

Across three essays, this dissertation examines how psychological traits influence entrepreneurial entry and startup performance, and how economic environments shape the relationship between the two. The first essay analyzes how founder personality traits relate to venture outcomes and highlights that some traits have stage-dependent effects across the startup life cycle. The second essay demonstrates that market cycles alter the psychological composition of individuals who enter entrepreneurship, leading to systematic differences in the types of ventures created. The third essay develops and tests a theory of contextual selection, showing that the relationship between founder traits and startup performance depends on the economic conditions under which entrepreneurial entry occurs.

Together, these findings highlight how psychological traits shape both selection into entrepreneurship and startup outcomes. By enabling large-scale measurement of founder psychology prior to venture creation, this dissertation not only allows longstanding questions about entrepreneurial traits and venture outcomes to be revisited with greater empirical rigor, but also expands the set of questions that can be studied about the psychological foundations of entrepreneurship.