Resolving Tensions Between Heterogeneous Investors in a Startup
研究了初创企业中不同资本投入和风险偏好的投资者之间的利益冲突，发现最优投资政策是顺周期的，且最优合约是定制化、相互依赖的，类似带有异质支付上限的优先股。
Legal scholars highlight the tensions that exist between different classes of shareholders in startups. We model a startup owned by undiversified investors with heterogeneous capital contributions and risk preferences. A social planner runs the firm on behalf of all investors. We compare investors’ expected utility with a hypothetical first-best decentralized benchmark. The startup’s optimal investment policy is procyclical and a time-varying weighted average of shareholders’ optimal investment policies. The optimal contracts issued to investors are tailor-made, interdependent, and include equity claims resembling preferred stock with heterogeneous payout caps, leading to a complex capitalization table as more investors join the startup. This paper was accepted by Will Cong, finance. Funding: This work was supported by the Cambridge Endowment for Research in Finance and Keynes Fellowship. Supplemental Material: The online appendices and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.01724 .