Entrepreneurial Intention To Venture Into Flea Market Retailing: An Empirical Study In Oman

Entrepreneurship is viewed by economists to be a combination of innovation and risk-taking. When such activity thrives, high growth rates are achieved as well as opportunities offered to all segments of society. Oman's government encourages continuously entrepreneurship to confront the rising number of fresh graduates annually, vis-a-vis the continuing high unemployment rate and the low national recruitment rate, especially following the recent decline in oil prices. This research aims to examine the extent of youngsters' entrepreneurial intention, especially among tertiary students in Oman, to venture into entrepreneurship through flea market retailing. Therefore, this study has adopted the theory of planned behavior (TPB) to examine the extent of the entrepreneurial intention of 291 final year students as primary survey data collected from colleges of applied sciences in Oman, and the data was analyzed by structural equation modeling (SEM). The study concludes that market analytics can develop students' intentions through affecting the three factors of Ajzen's model - attitude towards entrepreneurship, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control (Ajzen, 1991) - to become potential entrepreneurs in flea markets in Oman. This research adds value in both theory and practice by identifying that students with greater access to market analytics have stronger entrepreneurial intentions to pursue the entrepreneurial field, provided that they have the entrepreneurial attitude and support of the community.