关键词: 天使投资, 道德风险, 最优融资合约, 创业经历

Abstract:  The sound development and prosperity of start-up firms would be maintained for a long time in a good venture capital financing environment. As we all know, almost all the successful start-up firms at domestic and abroad have received various types of angel investment and venture capital support at the start-up stage. However, a large number of empirical studies have shown that due to significant information asymmetry between start-up firms and investors, the start-up firms are unable to raise sufficient funds to invest in all the valuable projects. From the perspective of investors, different with angel investors, venture capital funds are more inclined to invest mature companies in the growth stage and the expansion stage, but provide less support to start-up firms in the start-up stage and the seed stage. In the early stage of start-up project, small and medium-sized innovative enterprises need sufficient financial resources and technical support. In view of this and the importance of start-up firms, angel investments having startups as their main investment targets naturally become the most important financing channel for start-up firms.Similar to other financing methods, due to asymmetry of information such as the degree of work effort of entrepreneurs, there are several agency problems between investors and entrepreneurs in the entire process of angel investment. Specifically, the degree of work effort paid by the entrepreneur is unobservable and unverifiable and it could directly affect the profits of the invested start-up projects. As the setting in Holmstrom's model, we assume that there were only two degrees of work effort: exerting effort and shirking effort. Due to asymmetry of information between investors and entrepreneurs and the assignment of firm's assets liquidation value, entrepreneurs have incentives to obtain private benefits, which is obviously the moral hazard problem. Under this circumstance, entrepreneurs may shirk in pursuit of private benefits, leading to failure of enterprises at the start-up stage. On the other hand, if exerting effort increases the success probability of a start-up project, the entrepreneur will benefit from the long-term profits obtained by the project′s successful operation, which is much higher than the short-term private benefits. Therefore, whether there is an optimal financing ex-ante contract for angel investment, which significantly reduces the possibility of moral hazard occurrence for entrepreneurs, increases the success probability of investment projects, and meets the financing needs of start-up firms, it is worthy of further discussion in the studies of angel investment. Based on a comprehensive review of the angel investment financing model, this paper proposes an angel investment financing theoretical model under the framework of contract theory, to study the corresponding optimal financing contract and then gives in-depth answers to this and related questions.In the model setting, we assume that the discount rates of angel investors and entrepreneurs for future returns are risk-free interest rates, i.e., they are all risk-neutral. The financing contract of the angel investment includes the financing amount and the share allocation ratio of angel investors. According to relevant literature and a summary of investors′ actual investment experiences and abilities, investors are more focused on evaluating entrepreneurs than evaluating projects. An important content of evaluating entrepreneur is to examine and judge the entrepreneur′s experience and entrepreneurial abilities. Angel investors are more inclined to invest funds in entrepreneurial entrepreneurs with successful experience and outstanding ability. Therefore, our model quantifies the entrepreneur′s ability and successful experience as a quasi-asset with moral compensation benefits, so as to increase the entrepreneur′s new own capital on the premise of the project′s phased success, and enhance its competitiveness in obtaining subsequent venture capital funding. We also assume that angel investors as rational people will perform their due diligence after investment, and there is no moral hazard problem for angel investors. Thus, the model in this paper just discusses the case of unilateral moral hazard in which only entrepreneurs may have moral hazard. Considering the specific moral hazard problem, this paper proposes an analytical model based on the principal-agent theory to analyze the optimal financing amount and the optimal share allocation ratio. The theoretical results derived by our proposed model imply that: (1) The optimal share allocation ratio and the optimal financing amount of angel investment do exist, and the optimal financing contract could alleviate the entrepreneur′s moral hazard. (2) For the optimal financing amount, it would decrease as both the agency costs due to information asymmetry and the average market returns on investment raise. Moreover, the smaller the entrepreneur′s own initial capital, the lower the moral compensation benefits, the lower the project′s success probability, and the smaller the expected return rate, then the optimal financing amount for angel investment would get smaller. (3) For the optimal share allocation ratio of angel investor, it would increase as the success probability and the expected return rate of the start-up project, and the entrepreneur′s own initial capital decrease, and it would be reduced as both of the agency costs and the average market returns on investment increase, which are different with the results of the optimal financing amount. Meanwhile, the moral compensation benefit also has a positive impact on the optimal share allocation ration of the angel investor as the same impact on the optimal financing amount, which means the excellent entrepreneurial experience and ability could enhance the optimal financing amount but reduce the share allocation ratio of the entrepreneur.Thus, this paper could provide a reasonable and better explanation to the behavior of angel investments. Based on the theoretical results, several conclusions are drawn as follow: firstly, due to the asymmetric information between both sides of the financing contract, entrepreneurs and angel investors will play a game during the initial stage of entrepreneurship, so that the optimal share allocation ratio and optimal financing scale of angel investment exist, and the moral hazard problem can be effectively alleviated by the optimal financing contract. Moreover, the optimal contract would provide theoretical guidance for the design of angel investment financing contracts. Secondly, in order to reduce investment risks, due diligence on the investigation of entrepreneurial experience and abilities need to attract more attention of angel investors. Thirdly, for angel investors, they should also pay attention to their investigation of the private income sources of entrepreneurs.In summary, although the model and theoretical results of this paper are established and obtained on the basis of many strict assumptions, the research in this paper has strong practical guiding significance for the rapid and standardized development of angel investment.

Key words: angel investment, moral hazard, optimal financing contract, entrepreneurial experience