In classical Athens values and institutions encouraged all types of entrepreneurship. Successful entrepreneurs received social and many times political distinctions, which in the cases of some slaves reached the level of gaining their freedom. However, to deter phenomena of extreme individualism, success in business was judged by the means used to acquire wealth. For only those entrepreneurs were esteemed socially who worked hard and used ethical and fair means, who did not consume their wealth conspicuously, but shared it with the rest of the people by undertaking public expenses, and who abided by the laws and ordinances of the city-state.We thank the three anonymous referees as well as S. Iannidis and I. Minoglou for their very valuable comments and suggestions. The usual disclaimer applies.

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One of the basic ideas underlying the established conception of rational behavior is the unlimited substitutability of preferences. Economic agents are assumed to compare and reduce everything to a common denominator: utility. The most obvious example of such preferences can be found in standard consumer theory where complete substitutability of every good is assumed in the sense that a loss of some units of one bundle can always be compensated by gain of some units of another commodity (such preferences are sometimes called Archimedian—see Borch 1968). This conception of preferences has a long history in economic thought and forms the basis of the standard rational choice theory (Hicks and Allen 1934, Samuelson 1938, Hicks 1946, Houthakker 1950).

In countries with relatively small firms, entrepreneurial morality is determined by the influences that shape the values, the personality and the character of entrepreneurs as owners and managers of their enterprises. To shed some light on the processes involved we estimate an ordered probit model using data from 1643 enterprises, which were collected in Greece in the spring of 2006. We find that localized and generalized morality, the family and the educational environment, the level of education, the size of firms, and the moral factors that contribute to success in business, determine entrepreneurial morality in a statistically significant way. By contrast, even though we experimented with such other influences as the age of enterprises, the gender of entrepreneurs, the location of schools where they grew up, etc., none of them turned out to exert perceptible impacts.JEL Classification: M13, D29

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