Journal of Financial Economics·Volume 128, Issue 3·June 2018

实验成本与风险投资的演变

作者：Michael Ewens（California Institute of Technology）

Ramana Nanda（Harvard University）

Matthew Rhodes-Kropf（Massachusetts Institute of Technology, NBER）

摘要：我们研究了技术对创业成本的冲击如何导致风险投资模式在过去十年中以基本的方式进行调整。我们提出了一个框架，以了解近年来风险投资家（VC）投资策略的变化——“喷雾和祈祷”投资方法的普及，即投资者对更多的创业公司提供少量资金和有限治理，而这些公司他们更有可能放弃，但对最初的实验显著地告诉人们对该公司未来潜力的看法。新金融中介机构的这种适应和相关进入导致那些未来前景的信息能够迅速并且低成本展现出来的企业的创新成果不成比例地上升，而最初实验成本更高、信息展示更少的复杂技术企业的创新的相对份额则降低。

关键词：创新，风险投资，创业精神，投资，放弃期权

Cost of experimentation and the evolution of venture capital

Michael Ewens（California Institute of Technology）

Ramana Nanda（Harvard University）

Matthew Rhodes-Kropf（Massachusetts Institute of Technology, NBER）

ABSTRACT

We study how technological shocks to the cost of starting new businesses have led the venture capital model to adapt in fundamental ways over the prior decade. We both document and provide a framework to understand the changes in the investment strategy of venture capitalists (VCs) in recent years – an increased prevalence of a “spray and pray” investment approach – where investors provide a little funding and limited governance to an increased number of startups that they are more likely to abandon, but where initial experiments significantly inform beliefs about the future potential of the venture. This adaptation and related entry by new financial intermediaries has led to a disproportionate rise in innovations where information on future prospects is revealed quickly and cheaply, and reduced the relative share of innovation in complex technologies where initial experiments cost more and reveal less.

Keywords: Innovation, Venture capital, Entrepreneurship, Investing, Abandonment options

原文链接：https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304405X18300631#!

翻译：何杉