Design of an experimental study using a start-up simulator game among aspiring and practicing entrepreneurs

We designed an experimental study on entrepreneurship by using a Start-up Simulator game. The Start-up Simulator game was developed by professor and entrepreneur Steve Ahn. Five critical areas of decision-making for founders are addressed in the game: funding decisions, development, production decisions, marketing & sales decisions, and hiring decisions. Additionally, the game is played in a competitive environment between the teams in the labor and customer markets. This simulation provides an ideal environment for measuring the behavior of the experiment participants. In line with the theoretical foundations of Hsu, Simmons, and Wieland (2017), we created the experimental conditions to answer questions about founders' decision-making, growth, and risk-taking perceptions.

The founders begin the game with initial capital, trying to enter the semiconductor battery market. Due to the limited amount of initial capital, they need to try to fund the business to develop the first generation of products and, at the same time, hire people who represent the workforce and who will support the different areas of the company (development, production, sell, and marketing, accordingly to their skills). ... mehrAfter the development, the founders start to produce, sell and do marketing. The processes are repeated monthly, with the development of new generations of products and competition to get a better valuation of the company and maintain a reasonable level of ownership (shares).

In Fig. 2, the different stages of the experiment design based on Cooper (1987) are presented. The proposed presentation will provide an overview of the steps in planning the entire experiment, including observations and measurements from the pilot test. The operationalization of the experiment is summarized in Fig. 3 and 4 (Appendix) of this abstract. The experiment overview is divided into three phases: introduction, tutorial, intervention & main game, and end of the experiment.