Multistage Effort and the Equity Structure of Venture Investment Based on Reciprocity Motivation

For venture capitals, it is a long process from an entry to its exit. In this paper, the activity of venture investment will be divided into multistages. And, according to the effort level entrepreneurs will choose, the venture capitalists will provide an equity structure at the very beginning. As a benchmark for comparison, we will establish two game models on multistage investment under perfect rationality: a cooperative game model and a noncooperative one. Further, as a cause of pervasive psychological preference behavior, reciprocity motivation will influence the behavior of the decision-makers. Given this situation, Rabin’s reciprocity motivation theory will be applied to the multistage game model of the venture investment, and multistage behavior game model will be established as well, based on the reciprocity motivation. By looking into the theoretical derivations and simulation studies, we find that if venture capitalists and entrepreneurs both have reciprocity preferences, their utility would have been Pareto improvement compared with those under perfect rationality.