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Overconfidence has been reported to be a common bias among entrepreneurs and might be one cause of the high failure rates observed for new ventures. In this study, we investigate the overconfidence bias in a sample of 92 Austrian entrepreneurs, who responded to a general-knowledge questionnaire. Their levels of overconfidence were assessed by their responses to hard, medium and easy knowledge questions, and the relations of individual, organizational and environmental factors to the bias score were analyzed. The results confirmed that entrepreneurs are indeed prone to expressing overprecision, a type of overconfidence, but not when answering questions of all levels of difficulty. Being a single founder instead of a co-founder was identified as a significant predictor of overconfidence. Confidence, on the other hand, was associated with age and prior entrepreneurial experience, while accuracy was determined solely by age. The results of this study only partly agree with those of previous studies conducted in different national and cultural settings.

We examine the evidence from the long-run abnormal returns using data for 76 health care and biopharmaceutical initial public offerings (IPOs) listed in a 29-year period between 1986 and 2014 in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Laos. Based on the event-time approach, the 3-year stock returns of the IPOs are investigated using cumulative abnormal return (CAR) and buy-and-hold abnormal return (BHAR). As a robustness check, the calendar-time approach, related to the market model as well as Fama-French and Carhart models, was applied for verifying long-run abnormal returns. We found evidence that the health care IPOs overperform in the long-run, irrespective of the alternative benchmarks and methods. In addition, when we divide our sample into 5 groups by listing countries, our results show that the health care stock prices of the Singaporean firms behaved differently from those of most of the other firms in ASEAN. The Singaporean IPOs are characterized by a worse post-offering performance, whereas the IPOs of Malaysian and Thai health care companies performed better in the long-run.

Changes are required to encourage innovation in the industry. Some ways forward are described.