Neuro-Entrepreneurship and Opportunity-Seeking Consumers: Predicting Exploratory Purchase Choices from EEG, Eye-Tracking, and Mouse Behavior

Founded at the cross-point of neuroscience, entrepreneurship, and consumer behavior, neuro-entrepreneurship provides a theoretical basis of explaining the cognitive architectures that dictate the process of making decisions in a state of uncertainty. The current study explores the neurophysiological equivalents of the so-called consumer opportunity-seeking behavior by going beyond traditional self-reported measures and demographic profiling. The authors argue that the risk-taking and novelty-seeking characteristic of the entrepreneurial mindset is not peculiar to founders, but it can be described as a quantifiable state of mind that can be demonstrated by general consumers during exploratory search. The research uses a multimodal approach that involves electroencephalography (EEG), eye-tracking, and mouse-tracking and concludes that frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA) is a salient approach motivation biomarker. Further, it shows that visual entropy and trajectory complexity may be continuously used as non-invasive, non-needle measures of cognitive conflict. The authors offer a predictive basis of neuro-adaptive user interfaces (NAUIs) on the dynamic optimization of the digital decision-making environment using the Lab Streaming Layer (LSL) to align data on a sub-millisecond basis. The paper will end with a discussion of the ethical implications of such predictive technologies and a roadmap for future research in neuro-entrepreneurship.