The objective of this paper is to understand why venture capitalists often syndicate their investments, and how syndication aects their post-investment involvement. We consider a venture capital investment model, in which the quality of investment projects is unknown. Depending on their level of experience, venture capitalists are more or less ecient at screening projects. Screening can also be improved by a second investor appraisal. Obtaining this second piece of information can be costly though, since the initial venture capitalist has to disclose the existence of the investment project to a second investor. The latter becomes de facto a potential competitor, reducing the initial venture capitalist's prots. In this setting, we rst establish that syndication can be a coordination device to prevent competition. We then investigate how the syndication decision aects the screening process, and explore the cost of syndication in terms of investment decisions or post-investment involvement of venture capitalists. We conclude with empirical predictions linking the level of experience of venture capitalists, the decision to syndicate, the level of post-investment involvement and the characteristics of the venture capital investments.
This paper presents a model of media competition with free entry when media operators are financed both from advertisers and customers. The relation between advertising receipts and sales receipts, which are both complementary and antagonist, is different if media operators impose a price or a quantity to advertisers. When consumers dislike advertising, media operators are better off setting an advertising price than an advertising quantity. We establish a relationship between the equilibrium levels (advertising and entry) and the advertising technology. In particular, media operators' profit is not affected by the introduction of advertising when they impose advertising quantities and when advertising exhibits constant returns to scale in the audience size. Under constant or increasing returns to scale in the audience size, we find an excessive level of entry and an insufficient level of advertising.JEL Code: L13, L82.
We study the problem of an entrepreneur who faces two investors with private information about his project's profitability. We analyze the entrepreneur's optimal negotiation strategy. Importantly, we assume that the entrepreneur derives a private benefit of control so that he cares not only about expected monetary profits, but also about the probability to obtain financing. We show that if the entrepreneur can shop around with each venture capitalist's offer, he obtains high expected monetary profits. If he commits to a period of exclusive negotiation with one venture capitalist, before opening negotiation with its competitor, he can increase the probability to obtain financing, although the deal terms are less favorable. For low levels of private benefits, the model predicts that venture capitalists' deal flow is high, but that only the experienced venture capitalist makes profits. For high levels of private benefits, expected profits increase for the unexperienced venture capitalist, while the deal flow and expected profits decrease for the experienced venture capital firm.
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