Seminario 18/24: Vita Zhukova (UCAM) – The Role of Firms’ Trustworthiness in Business Angels’ Investment. Experimental Evidence from 3-player Trust Game

Información

Business Angels are private individuals who invest their personal financial resources in new and growing small firms. To study Business Angels’decisions we design an experiment based on the Trust Game (Berg et al., 1995) and add a third party, the Business Angel, who decides whether and how much to invest in a firm that is composed by an entrepreneur (i.e., a principal) and a worker (i.e., an agent).
We are primarily interested in analysing whether and to what extent firms’ trustworthiness explains Business Angels’ investments. Business Angels estimate firms’ trustworthiness from trust-based sources of information on firm members’ and all Business Angels’ behavior. Three experimental treatments define the information conditions on firms’ trust worthiness provided to the Business Angel.
Our findings suggest that awareness of the firms’ trustworthiness is crucial for strengthening Business Angels’ confidence and that integration and revealing of trustworthy relationship within the firm increases its competitiveness and becomes more attractive for potential investors.