The Impact Of Entrepreneurs' Counterfactual Thinking On Entrepreneurial Opportunity Exploitation

In the mass entrepreneurship and innovation era,people gradually pay attention to entrepreneurial activities.In 2017 the government work report also pointed out that the government will continue to promote " Innovation and Entrepreneurship ",encourage large enterprises and universities to set up professional publicly creative space,strengthen the support for the innovative small and medium-sized enterprises.In the academic world,the early research in entrepreneurship focused on individual characteristics of entrepreneurs,but since 1990s,the development of cognitive psychology and social psychology provides a new impetus to the study of entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurship research based on the perspective of entrepreneurial cognition continues to deepen.The study of entrepreneurial cognitions shows that the individual cognition structure cognition process is the root reason which causes the difference between entrepreneur and non entrepreneur.By studying the unique thinking and behavior of entrepreneurs,we can understand the entrepreneurial process of entrepreneurs.The existing research shows that entrepreneurs compared to non entrepreneurs will have more counterfactual thinking and counterfactual thinking is a way of thinking which denies the fact that has occurred and imagines another possible but not actual outcome.In the study of entrepreneurial counterfactual thinking,scholars have studied the difference of entrepreneurs and non entrepreneurs in the presence of counterfactual thinking and the influence of counterfactual thinking on the self-efficacy and behaviors of entrepreneurs.However,counterfactual thinking,as a unique way of thinking for entrepreneurs,how does it affect entrepreneurial activities?This paper aims to study the impact of entrepreneurs' counterfactual thinking on entrepreneurial activities.Specifically,this paper takes the opportunity recognition ability as a mediator to study the role of counterfactual thinking of entrepreneurs through opportunity recognition ability in entrepreneurial opportunity exploitation.The paper consists of 5 parts.The first part is the introduction.This part mainly presents the research background and research questions,through the analysis of the status quo of entrepreneurship and academic research in China,and then puts forward the research question of this paper.In addition,this paper expounds the theoretical and practical significance and innovation of this paper.The next part is the theoretical foundation and literature review.This part sorts out the research context of each variable by reading the relevant domestic and foreign literature about counterfactual thinking,entrepreneurial opportunity recognition ability and entrepreneurial opportunity exploitation,and then provides strong support for the next part.The third part is the research hypothesis,which is based on the literature review and puts forward the theoretical model and hypothesis.The fourth part is the design and analysis of empirical research.This part uses the SPSS22.0,AMOS,Mplus softwares for correlation analysis and regression analysis of the data,to verify the hypothesis on the part three.The fifth part is the research conclusion and the future prospect.This part mainly summarizes the research conclusions and research implications,and puts forward the future prospects.Through empirical analysis,the main conclusions of this study are:firstly,there are significant positive correlations between the counterfactual thinking of entrepreneur and the imitative entrepreneurial opportunity exploitation and the innovative entrepreneurial opportunity exploitation.And the innovative entrepreneurial opportunity exploitation is more significant.Then,there is a significant positive correlation between entrepreneur's counterfactual thinking and opportunity recognition ability.Thirdly,the opportunity recognition ability plays a partial mediating role in the relationship between counterfactual thinking of entrepreneur and innovative opportunity exploitation and the relationship between entrepreneur's counterfactual thinking and imitative opportunity exploitation.