Amount requested
The amount requested, AMOUNT REQ, was
extracted either from the planning documents or
from communications between the FVC and the
requesting firm. Forty percent of firms did not
request a specific amount of money. The dummy
variable D AMOUNT REQ took the value one if
the planning document contained a specific request
and zero otherwise. Conditional on the presence
of an amount, the average request sought $3.47M.
Because this variable is highly skewed (the maximum
is $60M), we use the natural log of the
amount requested (measured in thousands of dollars)
in our regression analysis.
Control variables
Proposed revenue model
Due to high uncertainty in the context of the
emerging Internet marketplace, we coded the revenue
model of each solicitation using a taxonomy