Behavioral Biases in Entrepreneurial Investment Decision Making: A Systematic Review With Implications for Emerging Economies

Entrepreneurs make investment decisions under uncertainty, limited information, and financial constraints, so their judgment is often shaped by heuristics and cognitive biases rather than formal rational analysis. Although such biases are well documented among stock market investors, the evidence on entrepreneurial settings remains scattered across finance, management, and psychology journals. This study examines how behavioral biases in entrepreneurial investment decision-making have been researched and identifies the dominant themes and underexplored areas of this literature. The study employs a systematic literature review that follows the PRISMA framework. A keyword search of Google Scholar, Emerald, and Scopus for 2000–2026 identified 185 records; 142 remained after duplicates were removed, 84 full-text articles were assessed, and 60 peer-reviewed studies were included and classified by year, journal, country, bias, data type, and statistical technique. The results show that 51 of the 60 studies (85.0%) were published from 2015 onward and that 41 (68.3%) used primary data, whereas 19 (31.7%) used secondary data. Overconfidence was the most frequently examined bias (29 studies, 48.3%), followed by herd behavior (17, 28.3%), anchoring (9, 15.0%), and mental accounting (5, 8.3%). The United States (12 studies, 20.0%) and India (8 studies, 13.3%) contributed the most studies, and regression analysis was the most common technique (18 studies, 30.0%). The findings of this study suggest that research on entrepreneurial investment behavior is concentrated on overconfidence and quantitative designs, whereas anchoring and mental accounting together account for only 23.3% of the reviewed studies, and evidence on women entrepreneurs and technology-driven decisions remains limited. JEL Classification Codes: D91, G24, G41, L26, M13.