مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد سرمایه گذاری جمعی سهام دو گروهی – الزویر 2019

This paper examines for the first time dual-class equity crowdfunding as a digital ownership model. Unique to this context, companies can set an investment threshold under which no voting rights are granted, making the issuance of Class A vs. Class B shares, depending on individual investors. Using a sample of 491 offerings on the UK platform Crowdcube from 2011 to 2015, we find that a higher separation between ownership and control rights lowers the probability of success of the offering, the likelihood of attracting professional investors, as well as the long-run prospects. Different from small investors, professional investors care about the implementation of a threshold for the attribution of voting rights and often bid the Class A threshold exactly. Family businesses, although less attractive to small investors, are relatively safer investments, because of their lower chances of failure.

Introduction

A growing interest in crowdfunding is shared by practitioners, policymakers, the media, and scholars alike. As a new and powerful tool for entrepreneurs, crowdfunding can help push the boundaries of existing theories and help develop new ones (Block et al., 2018). In fact, new digital technologies have transformed the nature of uncertainty inherent in entrepreneurial processes and outcomes as well as the ways of dealing with such uncertainty (Nambisan, 2017; Nambisan et al., 2017). While in reward-based crowdfunding backers pre-purchase a product or a service, in equity-based crowdfunding firms raise equity capital from investors who take ownership rights over the business (e.g., Ahlers et al., 2015; Vismara, 2016, [Vismara Vismara, 2018]; Hornuf and Schwienbacher, 2017; Walthoff-Borm et al., 2018a, 2018b).1 The implications of this process are significant. In particular, the information asymmetry concerning the start-up’s ability to generate future cash flows governs the crowdfunder’s decision to become a shareholder. As equity crowdfunders consider becoming minority shareholders, governance concerns arise from the separation between ownership and control. In this paper, we examine for the first time the implications of the separation of owners hip and control through a digital financing platform. The opportunity to raise public equity has been traditionally granted by stock exchanges. In initial public offerings (IPOs), the ownership base of firms going public is opened, often for the first time, to external shareholders. This typically represents the first event in a firm’s history that requires careful consideration of how to deal with the agency conflicts arising from both the separation between ownership and control (principal-agent) and between controlling and minority shareholders (principal-principal).