Overview

Professor Huang examines the micro-foundations of entrepreneurship: the individual-level decision-making processes that influence entrepreneurs’ ability to acquire resources that they need, yet lack, especially financial capital. Deploying a variety of methods from quantitative to qualitative, in a range of settings from the field to simulations to the laboratory, she explores questions about how and why investors rely on interpersonal relationships and implicit signals, perceptions, and behavioral cues, even when other sources of objective information (e.g., market data) are available. Her work contributes to larger areas of scholarship such as organizational decision making, uncertainty and judgment, and interpersonal bias; it also addresses practical implications for entrepreneurs pitching their start-ups, for investors seeking optimal investment decisions, and for the start-up ecosystem as a whole. In her work, she has examined the process through which relationships between entrepreneurs and investors develop and influence the growth of new ventures. She has also empirically examined, and identified, how “gut feel” acts as a key determinant in entrepreneurial decision-making, demonstrating that under appropriate conditions, and contrary to received wisdom, an investor’s gut feel can effectively predict profitable entrepreneurial investments. Huang has also examined some of the consequences of these phenomena by demonstrating how they can drive the potential for implicit bias in investors’ decisions. She has published work on the role that gender, accent, word choice, and physical attractiveness play in investors’ evaluations of entrepreneurs’ pitches, highlighting how perceptions and attributions often impact investment decisions, sometimes unknowingly.