More than capital? Transaction costs, trade-offs, and value for small businesses in novel funding transactions

The transaction cost economics framework has been used for more than three decades to explain how firms transact and organize in hierarchies and markets. However, when market innovations and societal changes occur, organizing theories should be updated to reflect the novel aspects of the environment. In this paper, we leverage recent technology and social innovations as a catalyst for synthesizing and extending transaction cost theory. Venture funding transactions today only vaguely resemble funding transactions from decades past. Yet, scholars still frequently rely on theoretical tenets that were established before the advent of the internet to explain funding transactions. In this research, we codify venture-funding modalities along a continuum from more market-esque to more hierarchical and develop funding transaction propositions for the new funding context.