Finance

Business

Investment (military)

Politics

Social venture capital

Political science

Artificial intelligence

Economics

Venture capital

Capital investment

Computer science

Selection (genetic algorithm)

SSRN Electronic Journal

Ties between similar partners in economic and financial networks are often attributed to concerns about agency costs. In this paper, we distinguish the underlying motives for tie formation between sets of potential partners in the network, thus informing the relative importance of agency cost and resource accumulation in tie formation across firms. We develop a robust and generalizable methodology that allows for the inference of similarity and/or cumulative advantage motives in the potential presence of resource trading. We estimate the model using venture capital (VC) co-investment networks, employing factor analysis to characterize orthogonal, interpretable resources for VC firms. In the VC setting, value-added resources other than capital appear to be exchanged for capital, but not for one another. We find little evidence for similarity motives as the primary driver of matching, suggesting that concerns over agency conflicts in partnering are dominated by the desire to accumulate higher levels of certain resources.

Partner Selection in Co-investment Networks: Evidence from Venture Capital