Das Multi-Task-Prinzipal-Agenten-Problem zwischen Venture-Capital-Gesellschaft und Management-Dienstleister (Inkubator) in Start-Up-Unternehmen

The financial press greeted the phenomenon of the new founders' era, which spilled over to Europe from the US, with headlines like"Venture Capital - Boost for Return","A new era for founders" or"Money as much as you want". Venture capital (vc) has contributed significantly to this trend. This form of financing allows to boost the development of a company without the negative aspects of straight debt, such as interest and payback, on its liquidity. Due to the fact that time to market of an innovation had become increasingly important, the venture capital industry changed. Within the last few years new forms of venture capitalists arose, which try to serve the increased need of the founders for management know-how/capability. All of the well-known management consultancies, e.g. McKinsey, BCG, Bain & Company, have founded incubators, which provide start-up-firms with capital and extensive management-know-how. Since a single venture capital firm often cannot provide capital and management know-how at the same time, there are mostly co-operations between different kinds of venture capitalists within one start-up-firm. In most cases incubators (mainly as management-know-how-providers) and venture capitalists (mainly as source of capital and personal networks) co-operate. This paper examines the dynamics of this co-operation. We have analyzed a multi-task principal-agent problem where the total effort is given. The agent (the incubator) is hired by the principal (venture capitalist) to improve the expected value of good projects and to detect bad ones. Hence, the incentive problem concerns the agent's (unobservable) effort division between these two objectives. First, we have shown that the necessity to induce truth-telling does not lead to additional agency costs. Second, if the agent has neither positive nor negative reputation costs, then (besides an up-front payment) two instruments are required to implement a first best, namely a reward alpha if the project is successful, and a premium phi for detecting bad ones. Without reputation effects, a first best without information rent arises regardless of the agent's wealth gamma. The optimal contract becomes more interesting if there are reputation effects. If reputation costs from failing projects are high compared to the benefits of successful projects, our model predicts that no detection premium is paid. This may hold for well-known successful incubator firms (i.e. MCKinsey, BCG and Bain & Company) which have a high intrinsic motivation to prevent projects with negative expected value from being carried out. The opposite may hold if a yet unknown start-up-firm wants to gain reputation from a successful project. These firms may often have too high an intrinsic incentive to improve potentially good projects at the expense of taking a high risk that bad projects are undertaken. Then, no reward for successful projects needs to be paid, but rather high premiums if projects are cancelled. In both cases, the first best allocation can be reached without paying a rent if the reservation utility and/or the agent's wealth are high. If there is no first best reachable without paying a rent, the degree of inefficiency depends on the wealth in the intermediate region, but the principal does not pay a rent at all. By contrast, the principal pays a rent in the low-wealth region, but the degree of inefficiency is then independent of the agent's wealth. Summing up, our model leads to clear predictions concerning the payments alpha, phi and the upfront payment, depending on wealth, reservation levels of utility, and reputation effects