A venture capitalist should react to information
with high cue validity. However, some characteristics
of the funding request may have low cue
validity but still influence VC decision making.
Operationally, we classify such characteristics as
ceremonial. In general, the outward characteristics
of the request, which presumably are meant to
conform to norms of exchange, are likely to have
lower cue validity than the information indicating
the presence of a known success factor. For example,
the degree to which an entrepreneur prepares
a document in a ‘standard’ way is not necessarily
correlated with the quality of the proposed venture,
whereas well-educated founders are known
to be associated with venture success (e.g., Bates,
1990). Thus, for screening purposes, knowing that
a founder is well educated should have higher cue
validity than receiving a conforming proposal.
Given that the entrepreneur is the source of
information, she is motivated to present the opportunity
in a positive light. She must decide whether
or not to include specific information in the request
for funding. This logic leads to two types of
hypotheses below. First, we hypothesize about the
inclusion of particular types of information, and
second, conditional on its inclusion, we hypothesize
about the quality of the venture as proxied by
this information.
Inclusion of information in a request for funding
indicates that the entrepreneur believes that
this information is an important signal to a venture
capitalist. Entrepreneurs include information
that fulfills communicative and ceremonial functions,
but hide unflattering qualities of the venture.
For example, Bull and Watson (2004) examine evidence
disclosure in a court of law in the context of
bilateral or multilateral trade contracts. They conclude
that positive evidence is forthcoming and
negative evidence is withheld, unless there is a
punishment for withholding evidence that is sure to
be discovered. By analogy, assuming VCs understand
the strategic nature of information disclosure,
the mere inclusion of particular types of information
will be an important cognitive cue. More formally,
if entrepreneurs believe that a higher value
of an attribute is viewed more favorably by VCs,
then the mean of this attribute in requests that disclose
this information will be higher than the mean
of this attribute in requests that choose not to disclose.
To be clear: our inferential strategy relies
strongly on this theoretical implication. Moreover,
if that type of information fulfills a communicative