AOM 02 Serial Ent

Failing firms and successful entrepreneurs:  Serial entrepreneurship as a simple machine

Given what we already know about firm success and failure, namely that most firms fail, what can we say anything about the possible success or failure of entrepreneurs? In this paper we argue that irrespective of what we believe the failure rate of firms to be, we can still rigorously understand entrepreneurial success/failure and derive useful prescriptions to improve success rates of entrepreneurs. Particularly, entrepreneurs can use Bayesianism as a control mechanism, instead of as an inference engine.