ABSTRACT

This study examines the implications of reputational concerns on a startup accelerator’s decisions towards effort exertion in the venture assessment process and strategic adoption of information revelation policies. In our model, the startup accelerator charges an equity share of the venture admitted into her acceleration program in exchange for the resources provided to help nurture and prepare the venture for fundraising from the investor. The accelerator can choose how much effort to exert in the accelerating process, which in turn determines how accurately the accelerator can learn about the quality of the venture. At the end of the acceleration program, the accelerator can then decide whether to reveal this quality information to the investor consistently with (full disclosure regime) or contrastingly to (biased disclosure regime) what has actually been observed. The accelerator’s reputation will be negatively affected if the venture’s performance does not match with what the accelerator previously announced to the investor. Our findings show that the accelerator is motivated to exert a high level of effort in learning about the venture’s quality and fully disclose the credible quality information to the investor when the severity of the reputational loss is sufficiently high. Otherwise, if the impact of the reputational loss is too small, the accelerator would exert no effort in assessing the venture’s quality and announce information about the venture based primarily on the market information, which may or may not match with what she has actually observed during the acceleration program. Furthermore, we show that a larger equity share makes the accelerator more sensitive to the reputational loss, and hence, the accelerator is better incentivized to exert significant effort to improve the accuracy of the venture’s quality information and adopt the full disclosure regime.

摘要

本研究探讨了声誉问题对创业加速器在风险评估过程中的努力投入和信息披露政策的战略采用决策的影响。在我们的模型中，创业加速器收取进入其加速计划的风险投资的股权份额，以换取提供的资源来帮助培育和准备风险投资以从投资者那里筹集资金。加速器可以选择在加速过程中付出多少努力，这反过来又决定了加速器了解风险企业质量的准确程度。在加速计划结束时，然后，加速器可以决定是向投资者披露这些质量信息，与实际观察到的一致（完全披露制度）还是相反（有偏见的披露制度）。如果企业的业绩与加速器之前向投资者宣布的不符，加速器的声誉将受到负面影响。我们的研究结果表明，当声誉损失的严重程度足够高时，加速器有动力在了解风险投资的质量方面付出高水平的努力，并向投资者充分披露可靠的质量信息。否则，如果声誉损失的影响太小，加速器将不会努力评估创业公司的质量，并主要根据市场信息发布有关创业公司的信息，这可能与她在加速计划期间实际观察到的情况相符，也可能不相符。此外，我们表明，更大的股权份额使加速器对声誉损失更敏感，因此，加速器更有动力做出重大努力来提高风险企业质量信息的准确性并采用完全披露制度。