Cohesiveness or competitiveness: Venture capital syndication networks and firms' performance in China

We use a time-sequence dataset of 837 Venture Capital Firms in China to investigate how the social network characteristics of these VC firms affect their performance. We identified three network positional features: degree centrality, Eigen-value centrality, and efficiency that hypothetically are consequential to a VC firm's performance. Our data analysis reveals that network efficiency is a significant but negative determinant of a VC firm's performance - the network inefficiency, measured by the extent to which the alter firms of an ego firm are connected with each other boosts the ego firm's performance. We discuss such findings by contextualizing them in the unique institutional environment and emerging market of China.