For entrepreneurs in financial distress, it is of vital importance that investors and bankers accurately assess the viability of their business, free of unwanted biases that bear no relevance to the assessment of the chance of survival. Despite the prevalence of entrepreneurs facing financial distress, little research has yet investigated the role of cognitive biases in funding decisions in this important context. The current research attends to this issue and investigated whether entrepreneurs who are perceived by a banker as more similar are more likely to receive capital to save their business from bankruptcy than entrepreneurs who are perceived as less similar to the banker. Additionally, we investigated whether similarity bias affected bankers' attributions of what caused the financial distress as well as their perceptions of entrepreneurs' trustworthiness. Using an experimental research design, we found a similarity bias in bankers' causal attributions and trustworthiness judgments, but not in their credit decisions. We contrast our findings with similarity bias research among equity investors and discuss the implications for theory and practice.

中文翻译：

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濒临破产的企业家信贷决策的相似性偏差

对于陷入财务困境的企业家来说，投资者和银行家准确评估其业务的可行性至关重要，避免与生存机会评估无关的不必要的偏见。尽管面临财务困境的企业家普遍存在，但很少有研究调查认知偏差在这一重要背景下在融资决策中的作用。当前的研究关注了这个问题，并调查了被银行家认为更相似的企业家是否比被认为与银行家不太相似的企业家更有可能获得资金以挽救他们的企业免于破产。此外，我们调查了相似性偏见是否影响银行家的 导致财务困境的原因以及他们对企业家可信赖度的看法。使用实验研究设计，我们发现银行家的因果归因和可信度判断存在相似性偏差，但在他们的信用决策中却没有。我们将我们的发现与股权投资者的相似性偏见研究进行对比，并讨论对理论和实践的影响。