ICO versus Credit versus Venture Capital Financing under Stochastic Demand: A comment on '`Entrepreneurial Incentives and the Role of Initial Coin Offerings'' by R. Garratt and M. v. Oordt

Linda Schilling

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The article 'Entrepreneurial Incentives and the Role of Initial Coin Offerings' by Garratt and van Oordt revisits a classical principal-agent problem in corporate finance: How do financing choices of firms and the according firm ownership structure impact effort choices of the management and therefore firm value? Garratt and Oordt extend this classic discussion by analyzing initial coin offerings (ICOs) as a startup financing instrument in contrast to classic financing instruments such as debt, (entrepreneurial) equity and venture capital. Their paper shows, depending on the firm's characteristics, ICO financing can align the entrepreneur's incentives with those of his investors better or worse, in comparison to venture capital and debt financing. Therefore, the novel ICO financing instrument is a valuable alternative to credit and venture capital also from a social perspective. I find the efficiency comparison of financing choices for entrepreneurial incentives to be a very interesting and important contribution. In this discussion, I shed light on this topic from a different angle. Garratt and van Oordt base their analysis on the simplifying assumption that demand for the platform product realizes once and for all in t=1. This allows Garratt and van Oordt to abstract from token-exchange rate risk. Here, instead, I will allow platform demand to evolve stochastically across time. Moreover, unlike in Garratt and van Oordt, I analyze the general case where not necessarily all tokens are sold in the market at every point in time. Instead, there can exist token speculation where investors hold on to tokens for a certain period of time, effectively reducing the token supply, or additional tokens can be mined by the entrepreneur, which increases the token supply, even though the latter activity might constitute a breach of contract. By allowing the token supply and product demand to fluctuate across time, the token exchange rate becomes stochastic, causing exchange rate risk to the ICO investors, the entrepreneur, and platform retailers.

Keywords: Initial coin offerings; financing instruments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E52 G3 G32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent
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