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1. Introduction
Decisions about which business opportunities to pursue and which to pass up are fundamental choices that shape when and where entrepreneurs enter the market as well as how managers navigate changing environments. These decisions fall within the opportunity evaluation phase of the entrepreneurial process (Williams and Wood, 2015) and involve discerning circumstances in which new products, services, or business models can be introduced profitably to one or more markets (Venkataraman and Sarasvathy, 2001). This is a challenging task for entrepreneurs and economic profit is the reward for correctly anticipating the future (e.g. obtaining resources at prices below the selling price). Thus it has been traditionally assumed that opportunity evaluation is primarily a function of accurately discerning if resource investments today will lead to an acceptable economic payoff in the future (Foss and Klein, 2012).
There is, however, a body of work that suggest that there is more to the story than simply economic payoff because opportunity evaluation is an interpretive endeavor (Barreto, 2012) whereby individuals attend to exogenous decision criteria to make judgments about the degree to which circumstances or events represent "an attractive opportunity for me or my firm" (Haynie et al. , 2009). This approach implies that while financial cost-benefit analysis may play a predominant role in opportunity evaluation, there is also a psychological dimension where specifically less pecuniary considerations come into play. These considerations can take many forms, but they typically involve personal costs that flow from threats to things like independence, prestige, and self-esteem that occur when one engages in behaviors that do not match with his or her values and goals (Greenberg et al. , 1992; Harmon-Jones and Mills, 1999). The implication is that as one evaluates the attractiveness of pursuing an opportunity, the financial return may form the baseline, but it is considerations of the degree to which pursuing the opportunity requires activities that are inconsistent with the entrepreneur's non-monetary goals that change the calculus.
Applied to the domain of public policy initiatives, these insights bring to the foreground the relationship between the policy environment and the cognitions and decision of individual entrepreneurs whose collective actions move the economy. This interaction has received very little attention in the literature, as prior work tends to focus on the...