*5.3. Limitations*

As is the case with all research studies, our work is subject to limitations. One limitation is that we restricted our study to five decision domains for which SME entrepreneurs seek the advice of their accountants. So, SME decisions that would not lend themselves for any involvement of the accountants, were excluded from our scope. We are not aware of relevant SME decisions that could be prone to biases and which are not included in our scope, other than the decision of choosing an accountant. At the same time, we cannot rule out that there may be other such decisions in which biases could play a role.

Another limitation is that our study was not longitudinal and therefore we relied on the accountants' recollection of biases in order to reconstruct how SME entrepreneurs made their decisions. We did not independently measure or verify the consequences of such biases, beyond the information that was provided by the interviewees. Therefore, we could not entirely eliminate the existence of cognitive biases from the end of the accountant in our data collection. However, the unique third-party position (Kahneman et al. 2011) that accountants have, o ffers them a very good stance to observe biases in the decisions that entrepreneurs make. On a related note, from the way we measure the importance of biases to entrepreneurial decisions, our results cannot distinguish between (1) how frequently a bias occurs as a percentage of the decisions that are taken, and (2) how strongly the bias a ffects the decisions. Both contribute to the importance that cognitive biases have in entrepreneurial decision making and serve the purpose of our study.

A final limitation is that our study was restricted to 14 Dutch SME accountants who had advised in decisions by over 3000 entrepreneurs in the Netherlands over a period of two or three decades in total. Of course, some of our findings may have been influenced by the particularities of Dutch culture. Therefore, we are cautious to generalize our exploratory findings to a larger population nor can we make any claims for similarities with other countries. However, we do know that our list of decision domains for which SME entrepreneurs seek advice of the external accountant as well as our list of biases are derived from international literature and were confirmed by our Dutch interviewees. So, at least there is a certain level of similarity of the Dutch context to other countries.

### *5.4. Directions for Future Research*

Our study suggests several avenues for future research. First, it would be useful to conduct longitudinal studies and interpret the e ffects of cognitive biases over time for the various types of decisions that we identified. Some types of decisions (e.g., HR decisions) are taken more frequently than others (e.g., succession planning) and such di fferences could shape the pattern of chance and impact of biased decisions.

Next, the results of our exploratory study could warrant further use of accountants as a source of information to examine entrepreneurial cognitive biases. Future research on this avenue could address the limitations of our study and expand to other countries, to a larger number of participants, and adopt a further refined instrument to measure and compare the importance of a series of cognitive biases on entrepreneurial decision making (in line with Keil et al. 2000).

In addition, there is a need to conduct research to test and verify the effectiveness of the actions that were suggested by the SME accountants to cope with these biases. Prior literature on the deaf effect, for example, suggests that the approach of giving warnings may only be successful under certain circumstances (Nuijten et al. 2016). Even though several of the approaches mentioned by the interviewees may have been successful for them, and are in line with literature on debiasing strategies, we believe it to be important to investigate such potential negative side-effects of the approaches that are described in this study.

Finally, while extant research has focused on entrepreneurs and accountants separately and considered individual biases, we believe that more work is needed that takes a holistic approach on these biases, the entrepreneurs, their accountants, and their relationships. We encourage other scholars to further develop our understanding of this important field.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, A.R. and A.N.; methodology, K.W., A.R., A.N. and N.B.; software, K.W. and A.N.; validation, N.B. and A.N.; formal analysis, A.N. and N.B.; investigation, K.W. and A.N.; resources, A.R.; data curation, K.W. and A.N.; writing—original draft preparation, A.N. and N.B.; writing—review and editing, A.R. and K.W.; visualization, A.R..; supervision, A.R. and A.N.; project administration, A.R. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
