Heed Our Advice: Exploring How Professionals Guide Small Business Owners in Start-Up Entity Choice

There is little work on how attorneys and accountants evaluate new small businesses when giving advice. The focus of this paper is to gain a better understanding of those factors that are important in the practice of advising small business owners on entity choice. We utilize a policy-capturing methodology to study how attorneys and accountants evaluate the likelihood they would advise a particular entity. Our results suggest that these two categories of advisers appear to prefer different factors when determining the forma sole proprietorship, partnership, limited liability companies, or S corporationsmall business should take.