March 9, Thomas Astebro
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…





