**1. Introduction**

Entrepreneurial decision making is a challenging task. The context in which entrepreneurs make decisions is extreme in various ways: high uncertainties and ambiguities, high consequences, time pressures, emotional anticipation, and reactions (Shepherd et al. 2015). Theory on bounded rationality (Simon 1947) suggests that in these types of decision environments, rational decision-making processes (referred to as system 2 by Stanovich and West 2000) are often pushed beyond their capabilities. When system 2 gets overwhelmed, decisions are dominated by the experiential and intuitive decision-making processes (referred to as system 1). Unfortunately, these system 1 decisions are prone to cognitive biases that can cause irrational decision making. As one solution to cope with the limitations of bounded rationality in organizational decision making, Simon (1947) introduced the idea of the so-called 'administrative man'. The administrative man, or woman, is someone who helps to provide organizations with objective and unbiased information to support decision making.

In line with this, Kahneman et al. (2011) recommend that for critical decisions, such as the introduction of new products, organizational decision makers should seek advice from an external party. Such a third party could contribute to more rational decision making by challenging assumptions and by uncovering potential biases in the decision-making process. A third-party role could therefore be of pivotal value to identify cognitive biases in entrepreneurial decision making (Abatecola et al. 2018, p. 412). External accountants fulfil this role for many small and medium enterprise (SME) entrepreneurs. They are frequently sought for advice—and invited to challenge the entrepreneur—when entrepreneurs

face critical decisions (Bennett and Robson 1999; Berry et al. 2006; Blackburn and Jarvis 2010; Suddaby et al. 2002). Therefore, SME accountants are in a unique position to provide insight in the way SME entrepreneurs make decisions across a variety of domains for which they seek the advice of their accountant.

To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to examine biases in entrepreneurial decision making from the perspective of SME accountants. Following a similar approach, in the business research domain of managing complex IT projects, insights from practitioners in a third-party role (i.e., information systems auditors) were used to shed light on cognitive biases (Keil and Robey 1999; Keil et al. 2000; Nuijten et al. 2019). In this study, we propose that this third-party view o ffered by seasoned SME accountants could similarly provide a contribution to extant literature on entrepreneurial decision making.

Results from interviews with 14 Dutch SME accountants, seasoned in this role and who combined have serviced over 3000 SME entrepreneurs over the years, provide a view from a third-party perspective on how these entrepreneurs make decisions. Following a deductive thematic analysis approach, we examine how 12 documented cognitive biases compare to each other in how important they appear to be in SME entrepreneurs' decisions. This comparative view across multiple cognitive biases contributes to the existing body of knowledge since many studies in this domain focus on one or two individual biases in isolation. While extant literature on cognitive biases in entrepreneurial decision making has predominantly focused attention on entrepreneurs' overconfidence, our results sugges<sup>t</sup> that other biases could warrant more research attention as well.

Furthermore, the findings from our study sugges<sup>t</sup> that the importance of many of those cognitive biases on entrepreneurial decisions varies across five decision domains for which entrepreneurs seek advice of their external accountants. These results contribute to the discourse since most of the extant studies depict entrepreneurial decisions as strategic investment decisions (start-up, market entry) or exit decisions. Our results however sugges<sup>t</sup> that entrepreneurs might struggle with cognitive biases across a wider range of critical decisions that involve business risks (other than strictly financial).

Finally, our interviews showed four di fferent approaches (warn, inform, intervene, and coach) that SME accountants take when they encounter cognitive biases in entrepreneurial decision making.

The remainder of our paper is organized as follows: In Section 2, we describe the theoretical background of our study. In Section 3, we discuss how the data for our study were collected and analyzed. Section 4 provides an overview of our research results. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of the implications of our study for both research and practice in Section 5.
