Toward a search perspective on entrepreneurship

Drawing on the behavioral theory of the firm, this dissertation examines the learning and searching processes in new ventures. This dissertation includes three essays, each focusing on one specific aspect of a search perspective on entrepreneurship. The first essay focuses on how new ventures learn from performance feedback in their pursuit of survival and growth, investigating the role of organizational attention in learning from performance feedback. The second essay focuses on R&D search under environmental jolts, investigating how environmental jolts affect new ventures' R&D search behavior. The third essay focuses on technological search and market search in new ventures, investigating how new ventures allocate resources to the two types of search and how such resource allocation affects new venture performance. As a whole, these three essays draw on the behavioral theory of the firm to develop a search perspective on entrepreneurship.