Abstract
This study examines how investors negotiate competing institutional logics when evaluating entrepreneurial storytelling under conditions of uncertainty. While prior research demonstrates that narratives shape resource acquisition, investor evaluation is often conceptualized as a discrete judgment rather than a temporally unfolding process. Building on institutional logics and social evaluation theory, we conceptualize investor judgment as a dynamic negotiation in which prosocial orientation and economic signaling function as shifting evaluative frames. Drawing on planned qualitative research based on 30–40 semi-structured interviews with investors and entrepreneurs across Japan and Europe, analyzed using the Gioia methodology and temporal bracketing, the study aims to develop a process model of how evaluative emphasis evolves across stages of engagement. By foregrounding the relational and temporal construction of legitimacy, the study seeks to contribute to research on entrepreneurial storytelling and institutional theory, offering a processual account of how moral and economic criteria are reconfigured in investor sensemaking.