{"id":1092,"slug":"stewart-roth-2001-entrepreneur-risk-propensity-contested","title":"Stewart & Roth 2001 (JAP) — entrepreneurs higher risk propensity than managers; effect concentrated in growth-oriented founders, not lifestyle owner-operators","kind":"reference","scope":"business","status":"current","audiences":["kevin","candid-team"],"topics":["gc-vertical","psychology-aversion","entrepreneur-cognition"],"reference_body":"**Claim:** Stewart and Roth (2001) meta-analyzed 14 studies and concluded entrepreneurs do show higher risk propensity than corporate managers — **with the effect concentrated among growth-oriented entrepreneurs rather than family-income-oriented entrepreneurs.** Observed d = 0.31 on objective instruments. The Miner-Raju 2004 reply (using a different instrument, MSCS-Form T) produced d = −0.35 in the opposite direction; Stewart & Roth 2004 sustained their original finding on data-quality grounds.\n\n**Source:** Stewart, W. H., Jr., & Roth, P. L. (2001). \"Risk Propensity Differences between Entrepreneurs and Managers.\" *Journal of Applied Psychology* 86(1): 145–153. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11302226/\n\n**Confidence:** Verified (with caveats — the literature is instrument-sensitive and contested).\n\n**For Candid — the operative inference:** Most GC owners Candid encounters are owner-operators running stable lifestyle businesses, **not growth-oriented founders**. The applicable empirical prior is therefore *risk-avoidant* — consistent with the foundation brief's framing ([[research-brief-psychology-gc-marketing-aversion-may-2026]]). Pitches that assume Silicon-Valley-style growth-orientation will misread the buyer.\n\n**Exception:** the small subset of growth-oriented founder-GCs (visible in design-build firms, scaling residential operations crossing the $5M-revenue threshold, second-generation owners actively professionalizing) for whom the standard frame fits and to whom strategic-reinvention pitches can land. See [[rule-bird-in-hand-pitch-architecture-default]] for how to segment.","rationale_body":null,"metadata":null,"links":{"outgoing":[{"slug":"research-brief-risk-aversion-post-failure-may-2026","title":"Research brief: risk aversion, loss aversion, and post-failure decision patterns in GC and trades-business decision-makers (May 2026)","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"}],"incoming":[{"slug":"bird-in-hand-sales-architecture-for-candid","title":"Bird-in-hand sales architecture — start from GC's existing assets, propose bounded incremental improvements; NOT strategic reinvention","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"},{"slug":"rule-bird-in-hand-pitch-architecture-default","title":"R7 — Bird-in-hand pitch architecture as default; begin from what the GC has, propose incremental improvements; reserve reinvention for growth-oriented founder-GCs","kind":"rule","scope":"business","link_type":"depends-on"}]},"created_at":"2026-05-25T13:13:30.961Z","updated_at":"2026-05-25T13:13:30.961Z"}