HEC Research Papers Series,
HEC Paris

Abstract: This paper studies entrepreneurs' choice of investors, who must provide financial capital and effort for projects with externalities. Venture capitalists (VCs) and individual investors (angels) compete to finance the projects. VCs seek to invest into a portfolio of projects, while angels have more slack in how much they invest into one project. In the presence of externalities between projects, VCs can potentially increase the total value of their investment portfolio through better coordination of investment, while some angels behave indulgently and give more financial investment than necessary, earning zero profits in equilibrium. Surprisingly, externalities do not give VCs as much of an advantage as one would expect. Quite often VCs lose out to angels even when this means that some projects will not receive an optimal amount of effort. In the projects they invest in, VCs always make strictly positive profits despite the competition.

Keywords: investment choice; venture capitalist; angel; project financing

JEL-codes: G24; G32

36 pages, November 1, 2002

Full text files

52e2d5d6d1944697479fb6a6162679c5.pdf  

Download statistics

• HEC Paris
• Ordering Working Papers
• Home page for this series

Questions (including download problems) about the papers in this series should be directed to Antoine Haldemann ()
Report other problems with accessing this service to Sune Karlsson ().

This page generated on 2024-02-05 15:47:25.