This paper surveys empirical and theoretical studies of various control mechanisms embedded in venture capital contracts. These mechanisms mitigate incentive problems and opportunistic behavior arising in the uncertain environment of financing young hightechnology enterprises that predominantly...

This paper examines the impact of venture capitalists' reputation building and experience accumulation on the genesis of venture capital markets. Venture capitalists must accumulate experience to successfully support high-technology enterprises. They must build reputation, i.e., a track record...

Using an agency framework, this paper examines advantages of offering venture capitalists a choice between public equity and loan schemes. Both schemes can be used to promote venture capital investments in hightechnology enterprises since they encourage inexperienced venture capitalists to...

Venture projects are fraught with exogenous market risk and endogenous agency risk. We apply a real options perspective to analyze the investment decision of the venture capitalist (VC) in this set-up. The solutions presented are conflictive: the VC reduces his exposure to exogenous risk by...

Venture capital markets are characterized by multiple incentive problems and asymmetric information in an uncertain environment. All kinds of agency problems are present: moral hazard, adverse selection, hold-up problems, window dressing, etc. Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists enter into...