An attention-based view on environmental exigencies and opportunity valuation

Abstract

Attention-based view of the firm (ABV) combines structural components of the task environment with cognitive components of the decision-maker, developing a comprehensive perspective of strategic behavior. ABV suggests strategic behavior is an outcome of a decision maker's rationalization of the firm's operating environment. The attention-based view of the firm suggests that noticed change in a firm's operating environment leads to a corresponding change in firm behavior. Additionally, whether decision-makers rely on intuition or deliberate reasoning to construe the change influences the relationship between 'noticing an environmental change' and 'change in opportunity valuation. This dissertation builds on Shepherd et al.'s (2017) attentional model and develops a theoretical framework that identifies the antecedents of change in opportunity valuation. This dissertation hypothesizes that i) noticing environmental change mediates the relationship between change in environmental exigencies and change in opportunity valuation, and ii) cognition of decision-makers moderates the mediating effect. With the aid of a double randomized experimental design and data collected through Amazon M-Turk, the findings from this dissertation support the hypothesis that noticing environmental change mediates the relationship between change in environmental exigencies and change in opportunity valuation. However, findings related to the second hypothesis were inconsistent. This dissertation extends the literature on the attention-based view, environmental exigencies, cognition, and opportunities. Furthermore, limited research within the entrepreneurship domain has applied an experimental approach to a complex moderated-mediation model; this dissertation also makes a methodological contribution by exhibiting an approach to testing a moderated-mediation model using an experimental approach.