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Introduction
Because of the increasing importance of women entrepreneurs for new venture creation (Langowitz and Minniti, 2007) and economies (Brush and Cooper, 2012), as well as the growing number of women entrepreneurs (Ahl and Nelson, 2015), the research on women entrepreneurship (Sullivan and Meek, 2012) and gender-related issues (Jennings and Brush, 2013) has gained momentum over the past few decades. This has contributed to an increasing number of comparative studies of women and men entrepreneurs over topics such as risk-taking (Sexton and Bowman-Upton, 1990), growth (Fischer et al., 1993), self‐efficacy (Wilson et al., 2007), opportunities (DeTienne and Chandler, 2007) and finance (Harrison, and Mason, 2007).
On the other hand, decision-making is one of the most crucial entrepreneurial tasks which has recently become a very important topic in the field of entrepreneurship (Benevolo et al., 2021). Given their specific cognitive characteristics as well as constant encounter with uncertainty, time pressure and information overload (Shepherd et al., 2015), entrepreneurs are susceptible to numerous decision-making biases (Baron, 1998), which are thought processes that include some false predispositions (Forbes, 2005) and exert substantial influences on entrepreneurs’ decisions (Zhang and Cueto, 2017).
Furthermore, one of the most important biases is the escalation of commitment, which may influence the success or eventual demise of businesses (Hung et al., 2011) and happens when individuals become mired in costly courses of actions (Staw, 1981) by allocating growing amounts of resources to ongoing plans, especially after receiving negative feedback in the wake of putting those plans into practice (Brockner, 1992). While the escalation of commitment to a failing course of action happens in a variety of contexts (Lee et al., 2015), it is specifically rife in entrepreneurial decisions, given specific entrepreneurial cognitive characteristics (Baron, 1998). Although the escalation of commitment has important practical implications (Bazerman and Moore, 2013) and may result in the loss of market share and even bankruptcy (Woods et al., 2012), there are certain research gaps in the field of entrepreneurship, especially regarding its antecedents (Nouri, 2021).
Besides, although gender influences entrepreneurs’ decisions (Bendell et al., 2020) and women and men entrepreneurs are heterogeneous regarding their decisions (Shepherd and Patzelt, 2017), the number of studies on women entrepreneurs’ decisions are scarce (Nouri et...