First, the few rich guys that I know (north of $10m) are shitheads. Not that they are personally offensive, or even necessarily morally bankrupt. Instead they are willing to ask for asinine things from people who should rightly be offended by the request. They try to make deals that favor them without regard to the interests of the other person, and it turns out to be a winning strategy because they'll get rejected over and over, but in the 10 or 20% of cases where they win, they get ridiculously good deals.

That tendency to ask for too much could be seen as a type of over confidence, but it's also a riskier strategy on average.

Then, these people are almost indifferent to the details of whatever deal they've made. They will make a deal that is exactly what it needs to be to get signed, but which is utterly impossible to deliver. They don't care: "it'll work out."

That's another form of over confidence: the belief that impossible things will work out well enough. It also turns out to be true enough to get someone into the multimillionaire range. One has to be a little more careful to break much higher than that, but it's a good starting strategy. And again, it's a risk to make a deal you might not be able to deliver on.

I didn't read the paper, but I know that dissertations necessarily have to be very limited, so they tend to be simplistic when they are original research, so I wonder:

1) Who was in the entrepreneur group? Successful serial entrepreneurs, or just some undergrad kids in the entrepreneur club?

2) How risk measured? A little psychological battery designed to measure general risk-taking won't capture the mindset of a person who does shaky deals. Is it risky to do try for a deal that'll probably fall through and you probably can't deliver on, or is it safer to do lots of quick and dirty deals so the volume makes up for the instability? How could this paper have measured that?

If anyone has access to this database, let us know the answers: http://mansci.journal.informs.org/cgi/content/abstract/52/9/...