Date: 09 March 2026, Monday
Time: 13.30 – 14.30
Place: MA-330
“Accuracy and uncertainty in venture selection:
The roles of experience and complexity”
by
Thomas Astebro
HEC Paris
Abstract
Venture capitalists, business angels, funding agencies, and incubators evaluate ventures,a difficult task where decision uncertainty is high. We examine how the degree of cognitive complexity and human expertise affects judges’ admission recommendations at an incubator. Judges read an application, use preset criteria to score it, and form an intuitive overall judgment to accept or reject the application. We model and test how cognitive complexity and judge expertise affect this judgment through a Bayesian classification model, with implications on classification uncertainty and accuracy. Judges demonstrate poor accuracy in evaluating venture quality, but we show that the decision environment is so noisy that they can’t do much better. Bayesian models of judgment capture much of the decision variation. Complexity raises uncertainty and lowers classification accuracy, while expertise reduces uncertainty and improves accuracy; the expertise premium is largest at intermediate complexity levels.
Bio
Thomas Astebro is the Executive Director and Professor at the ION Management Science Lab at HEC Paris; and Scientific Director and Founder of the Creative Desctruction Lab in Paris. Leading the ION Lab he directs a group of researchers on the selection and training of talent, with a focus on AI augmentation of these human processes. He recently concluded an RCT at scale in Ecuador where over 30,000 high school students were touched with various new online training initiatives. He is now scaling up an RCT with France Travail, seeking to train the unemployed in useful skills using online and AI tools to get them to employment or to become entrepreneurs. With Carlos Serrano, CDL and the HEC Incubateur he is also exploring how to better identify and select ventures and to augment training and mentoring of founders using new AI tools. He has held various high-level administrative positions at HEC and University of Waterloo and has been an entrepreneur four times. He is listed in Marquis Who’s Who in the World , is among the top 1 percent most downloaded authors on www.ssrn, has made over 300 presentations, published over 40 academic journal articles, and has been mentioned in business media over 50 times (including The Economist, Business Week, The Times, and Wall Street Journal). He has previously held positions at University of Waterloo, University of Toronto, and KU Leuven. He earned his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in the United States and holds both a Master of Engineering and an MBA from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.