The role of affect in international opportunity recognition and the formation of international opportunity beliefs

Abstract Despite the significance of individual factors in how entrepreneurs recognize international opportunities either by active search or passive discovery, prior research has typically focused on cognitive aspects overlooking affect as a critical driver this process. Drawing upon broaden-and-build and affect-as-information theories, we explore courage, hope, fear failure, anticipated regret, stable affective dispositions, can influence entrepreneurs’ opportunity recognition (IOR). Also, based mental model theory, examine whether both processes lead to differently form desirability feasibility beliefs judge recognized foreign market. Based data from sample 172 entrepreneurs, find that hope regret are positively related IOR. Hope courage IOR, failure negatively Moreover, IOR better informs than which indeed only predicts feasibility. These findings original novel thus add value flourishing literature individual-level emerging formed evaluate IOs.