How Pitch Order Affects Investor Interest

Abstract

The rise of business accelerators, angel groups, and startup competitions has meant that founders increasingly pitch their businesses to investors in group settings, raising the question of whether the order in which ideas are pitched affects outcomes. We test in a field experiment whether range-frequency theory or the theory of bounded rationality better predicts the effect of serial position on pitch outcomes. We find that range frequency theory better predicts the empirical patterns than the theory of bounded rationality.JEL Codes: M13, G30, G40