Can mass media and the educational institutions change the entrepreneurial culture? A study of how a single story can change the risk-taking behaviour of individuals

Willingness to take risk is an important characteristic of entrepreneurship and a crucial factor for economic growth. Data show that compared to their US counterparts, people in Europe, and even more so in Eastern Europe, are less willing to undertake the risk of building their own business. The experimental data presented in this paper demonstrate that people can use even a single episode from their own past experience (or from a newspaper story) where they or someone else acted in a risky manner and benefited from that, and choose to act riskily in a new situation by analogy. Thus, the possibility of developing an active policy for developing risk-taking preference and entrepreneurial culture by providing many positive examples of such behaviour via the mass media, the film industry, and educational system is open and could turn out to be effective even in the short run.