IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jbvent/v24y2009i2p116-133.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Prediction and control under uncertainty: Outcomes in angel investing

Author

Listed:
  • Wiltbank, Robert
  • Read, Stuart
  • Dew, Nicholas
  • Sarasvathy, Saras D.

Abstract

Venture investing plays an important role in entrepreneurship not only because financial resources are important to new ventures, but also because early investors help shape the ventures' managerial and strategic destiny. In this study of 121 angel investors who had made 1038 new venture investments, we empirically investigate angel investors' differential use of predictive versus non-predictive control strategies. We show how the use of these strategies affects the outcomes of angel investors. Results show that angels who emphasize prediction make significantly larger venture investments, while those who emphasize non-predictive control experience a reduction in investment failures without a reduction in their number of successes.

Suggested Citation

  • Wiltbank, Robert & Read, Stuart & Dew, Nicholas & Sarasvathy, Saras D., 2009. "Prediction and control under uncertainty: Outcomes in angel investing," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 24(2), pages 116-133, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jbvent:v:24:y:2009:i:2:p:116-133
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0883-9026(08)00012-8
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Joel A. C. Baum & Tony Calabrese & Brian S. Silverman, 2000. "Don't go it alone: alliance network composition and startups' performance in Canadian biotechnology," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 21(3), pages 267-294, March.
    2. J. Robert Baum & Stefan Wally, 2003. "Strategic decision speed and firm performance," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 24(11), pages 1107-1129, November.
    3. Jerker Denrell & James G. March, 2001. "Adaptation as Information Restriction: The Hot Stove Effect," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 12(5), pages 523-538, October.
    4. Saras Sarasvathy & Nicholas Dew, 2005. "New market creation through transformation," Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Springer, vol. 15(5), pages 533-565, November.
    5. Stewart Thornhill & Raphael Amit, 2003. "Learning About Failure: Bankruptcy, Firm Age, and the Resource-Based View," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 14(5), pages 497-509, October.
    6. Vance H. Fried & Robert D. Hisrich, 1994. "Toward a Model of Venture Capital Investment Decision Making," Financial Management, Financial Management Association, vol. 23(3), Fall.
    7. Henry Mintzberg & James A. Waters, 1985. "Of strategies, deliberate and emergent," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 6(3), pages 257-272, July.
    8. Thomas Hellmann & Manju Puri, 2002. "On the fundamental role of venture capital," Economic Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, vol. 87(Q4), pages 19-23.
    9. Buchanan, James M. & Vanberg, Viktor J., 1991. "The Market as a Creative Process," Economics and Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, vol. 7(2), pages 167-186, October.
    10. Vance H. Freid & Robert D Hisrich, 1994. "Toward a Model of Venture Capital Investment Decision Making," Financial Management, Financial Management Association, vol. 23(3), Fall.
    11. Jain, Bharat A., 2001. "Predictors of performance of venture capitalist-backed organizations," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 52(3), pages 223-233, June.
    12. Gifford, Sharon, 1997. "Limited attention and the role of the venture capitalist," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 12(6), pages 459-482, November.
    13. Prowse, Stephen, 1998. "Angel investors and the market for angel investments," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 22(6-8), pages 785-792, August.
    14. Anderson, Philip & Tushman, Michael L, 2001. "Organizational Environments and Industry Exit: The Effects of Uncertainty, Munificence and Complexity," Industrial and Corporate Change, Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC, vol. 10(3), pages 675-711, September.
    15. Bruce Kogut & Nalin Kulatilaka, 2001. "Capabilities as Real Options," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 12(6), pages 744-758, December.
    16. Donald D. Bergh & Michael W. Lawless, 1998. "Portfolio Restructuring and Limits to Hierarchical Governance: The Effects of Environmental Uncertainty and Diversification Strategy," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 9(1), pages 87-102, February.
    17. Warren Boeker & Robert Wiltbank, 2005. "New Venture Evolution and Managerial Capabilities," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 16(2), pages 123-133, April.
    18. Mason, Colin M. & Harrison, Richard T., 2002. "Is it worth it? The rates of return from informal venture capital investments," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 17(3), pages 211-236, May.
    19. J. Robert Mitchell & Paul N. Friga & Ronald K. Mitchell, 2005. "Untangling the Intuition Mess: Intuition as a Construct in Entrepreneurship Research," Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, , vol. 29(6), pages 653-679, November.
    20. Gupta, Anil K. & Sapienza, Harry J., 1992. "Determinants of venture capital firms' preferences regarding the industry diversity and geographic scope of their investments," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 7(5), pages 347-362, September.
    21. Shepherd, Dean A. & Douglas, Evan J. & Shanley, Mark, 2000. "New venture survival: Ignorance, external shocks, and risk reduction strategies," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 15(5-6), pages 393-410.
    22. James G. March & Zur Shapira, 1987. "Managerial Perspectives on Risk and Risk Taking," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 33(11), pages 1404-1418, November.
    23. Timothy W. Ruefli & James M. Collins & Joseph R. Lacugna, 1999. "Risk measures in strategic management research: auld lang syne?," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 20(2), pages 167-194, February.
    24. Einhorn, Hillel J & Hogarth, Robin M, 1986. "Decision Making under Ambiguity," The Journal of Business, University of Chicago Press, vol. 59(4), pages 225-250, October.
    25. Lerner, Joshua, 1994. "Venture capitalists and the decision to go public," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 35(3), pages 293-316, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Patzelt, Holger & zu Knyphausen-Aufseß, Dodo & Fischer, Heiko T., 2009. "Upper echelons and portfolio strategies of venture capital firms," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 24(6), pages 558-572, November.
    2. Woike, Jan K. & Hoffrage, Ulrich & Petty, Jeffrey S., 2015. "Picking profitable investments: The success of equal weighting in simulated venture capitalist decision making," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 68(8), pages 1705-1716.
    3. Ko, Eun-Jeong & McKelvie, Alexander, 2018. "Signaling for more money: The roles of founders' human capital and investor prominence in resource acquisition across different stages of firm development," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 33(4), pages 438-454.
    4. Petty, Jeffrey S. & Gruber, Marc, 2011. ""In pursuit of the real deal": A longitudinal study of VC decision making," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 26(2), pages 172-188, March.
    5. Johannes Wallmeroth & Peter Wirtz & Alexander Peter Groh, 2017. "Institutional Seed Financing, Angel Financing, and Crowdfunding of Entrepreneurial Ventures: A Literature Review," Working Papers hal-01527999, HAL.
    6. Dimo Dimov & Gordon Murray, 2008. "Determinants of the Incidence and Scale of Seed Capital Investments by Venture Capital Firms," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 30(2), pages 127-152, February.
    7. Sebastian Schmidt & David Bendig & Malte Brettel, 2018. "Building an equity story: the impact of effectuation on business angel investments," Journal of Business Economics, Springer, vol. 88(3), pages 471-501, May.
    8. Gorman, Gary G. & Rosa, Peter J. & Faseruk, Alex, 2005. "Institutional lending to knowledge-based businesses," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 20(6), pages 793-819, November.
    9. Willem Smit, 2023. "Top Manager Heuristics Under Knightian Uncertainty: Control Versus Prediction and the Moderating Impact of Framing," Journal of Management Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 60(5), pages 1302-1340, July.
    10. Lutz, Eva & Bender, Marko & Achleitner, Ann-Kristin & Kaserer, Christoph, 2013. "Importance of spatial proximity between venture capital investors and investees in Germany," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 66(11), pages 2346-2354.
    11. Zhujun Ding & Sunny Sun & Kevin Au, 2014. "Angel investors’ selection criteria: A comparative institutional perspective," Asia Pacific Journal of Management, Springer, vol. 31(3), pages 705-731, September.
    12. Dutta, Supradeep & Folta, Timothy B., 2016. "A comparison of the effect of angels and venture capitalists on innovation and value creation," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 31(1), pages 39-54.
    13. Kollmann, Tobias & Kuckertz, Andreas, 2010. "Evaluation uncertainty of venture capitalists' investment criteria," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 63(7), pages 741-747, July.
    14. Elitzur, Ramy & Gavious, Arieh, 2003. "Contracting, signaling, and moral hazard: a model of entrepreneurs, 'angels,' and venture capitalists," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 18(6), pages 709-725, November.
    15. Rosenbusch, Nina & Brinckmann, Jan & Müller, Verena, 2013. "Does acquiring venture capital pay off for the funded firms? A meta-analysis on the relationship between venture capital investment and funded firm financial performance," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 28(3), pages 335-353.
    16. N. Berger, Allen & F. Udell, Gregory, 1998. "The economics of small business finance: The roles of private equity and debt markets in the financial growth cycle," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 22(6-8), pages 613-673, August.
    17. Wesley II, Curtis L. & Kong, Dejun Tony & Lubojacky, Connor J. & Kim Saxton, M. & Saxton, Todd, 2022. "Will the startup succeed in your eyes? Venture evaluation of resource providers during entrepreneurs' informational signaling," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 37(5).
    18. Townsend, David M. & Busenitz, Lowell W., 2015. "Turning water into wine? Exploring the role of dynamic capabilities in early-stage capitalization processes," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 30(2), pages 292-306.
    19. Dunne, Timothy C. & Clark, Brent B. & Berns, John P. & McDowell, William C., 2019. "The technology bias in entrepreneur-investor negotiations," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 105(C), pages 258-269.
    20. Lavanchy, Maude & Reichert, Patrick & Joshi, Amit, 2022. "Blood in the water: An abductive approach to startup valuation on ABC's Shark Tank," Journal of Business Venturing Insights, Elsevier, vol. 17(C).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:jbvent:v:24:y:2009:i:2:p:116-133. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jbusvent .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.