悬赏沪元:200 浏览 812 次
4.3. Choice of financing strategy
The entrepreneur has two alternative strategies she can adopt:
1. The wait-and-see strategy (S1): The E can wait and see if she can find an interested venture capitalist before spending much time and effort on the project. If she cannot find a venture capitalist before time T, the project is no longer of any value to her. However, if she finds a venture capitalist, her bargaining power is a function of the time remaining before the option is lost (the idea is that an entrepreneur who is time-constrained has less bargaining power than one who can wait another year or so before starting the project—the latter can then look around for additional investors in order to increase her bargaining power).
2. The just-do-it strategy (S2): she can invest the amount k now in order to start the project, knowing that this is not enough to complete it. However, it allows the entrepreneur to accomplish (with some probability) a milestone that will make the project worthwhile for large outside investors. If successful, VCs will compete for the project (since now they all find the project sufficiently large) so that the entrepreneur will have all the bargaining power vis-a-vis venture capitalists).
For simplicity, both strategies are assumed to be mutually exclusive, and the entrepreneur only needs to inject the amount k into the firm if she chooses S2.5 Moreover, once the E has chosen a strategy, she can no longer change it. Under S2, the liquidation value is 0 if the E has not raised the remaining amount of money required before time T. Another simplifying assumption is that all venture capitalists in the market have enough funds to finance any other valuable project they can find, so that there is no competition among entrepreneurs for venture capital funding once a match is made. We also assume that both strategies are profitable for the E at time t = 0. The VC participation constraint must also be satisfied, which we assume to be the case even at time 0 (to avoid an additional constraint). Lastly, as in Myers (2000) and many other studies, we assume that the financing strategy of the E at time t = 0 is a non-contractible variable (and thus also the investment k). If both parties were able to contract on it, the first-best outcome would always be achieved. This assumption is irrelevant in the basic setting (Section 5), but is important in Section 6. This implies that the costs k are at the discretion of the entrepreneur (e.g., she may be able to decide on the company's “burn rate”) and hence a BA cannot force the E to undertake S2 (however, he can, of course, force S1 by delaying the supply of capital k to the entrepreneur).6