Digitalization has generated massive amounts of available data sources (Wedel and Kannan 2016). Consequently, firms aim to exploit this additional value – particularly in decision-making (Barton and Court 2012). However, potential misleading consequences of Big Data for companies have not been examined yet – neither in practice nor in research. Addressing this research gap, the current investigation first uncovers questionable managerial outcomes and behaviours generated by Big Data. The results of a first paper-and-pencil experiment show that executives tend to rely on Big Data even in a domain where this may be misleading (i.e., innovation) (Martin and Golsby-Smith 2017). Interestingly, this relationship is found to be particularly evident for top-managers. A second online study does not only replicate the findings in a correlational setting but beyond sheds light on its mechanism. We show that Big Data activates top-executives’ promotion focus leading them to become more risk seeking and egocentric. In study 3, we replicate these findings through experimentation and moderation underlining its robustness. Finally, we detect a lever to avoid that Big Data leads to less defensive decision behaviour (study 4).

The present research deals with the influence of managers’ construal level and anticipatory regret behavior on evaluations of customers’ and employees’ ideas in innovation contexts. While prior research focused on positive outcomes of open innovation, we provide theory and evidence to suggest that managers’ avoidance behavior in idea evaluation processes can result in negative side effects for the assessment of employees’ ideas. We conducted an experiment with 113 managers to reveal that top managers tend to higher creativity ratings of ideas from customers in comparison to identical ideas from employees. Lower level managers showed no difference in their creativity evaluations, but differentiated their feasibility rating in favor for customers’ ideas, whereas top managers did not. Our findings contribute to existing managerial decision making research and provide initial evidence on negative outcomes of open innovation for managers’ evaluation of employees’ ideas.