This work investigates the role of equity ownership for the purpose of committing the management to the pursuit of shareholder value in the presence of separation between ownership and control. By rooting the conflicts of interests between managers and shareholders upon the control of internal...

Recent theoretical research in corporate finance has highlighted the role of incentive problems between firms' investors and insiders in determining corporations' financial structures, dynamics and investment policies. Financial contracts are designed to mitigate these agency conflicts. However,...

We develop a model in which a startup firm issues tokens to finance a digital platform, which creates agency conflicts between platform developers and outsiders. We show that token financing is generally preferred to equity financing, unless the platform expects strong cash flows or faces severe...