Investment Decision Making under Uncertainty: The Impact of Risk Aversion, Operational Flexibility, and Competition
نویسنده
چکیده
Traditional real options analysis addresses investment under uncertainty assuming a risk-neutral decision maker and complete markets. In reality, however, decision makers are often risk averse and markets are incomplete. Additionally, capital projects are seldom nowor-never investments and can be abandoned, suspended, and resumed at any time. In this thesis, we develop a utility-based framework in order to examine the impact of operational flexibility, via suspension and resumption options, on optimal investment policies and option values. Assuming a risk-averse decision maker with perpetual options to suspend and resume a project costlessly, we confirm that risk aversion lowers the probability of investment and demonstrate how this effect can be mitigated by incorporating operational flexibility. Also, we illustrate how increased risk aversion may facilitate the abandonment of a project while delaying its temporary suspension prior to permanent resumption. Besides timing, a firm may have the freedom to scale the investment’s installed capacity. We extend the traditional real options approach to investment under uncertainty with discretion over capacity by allowing for a constant relative risk aversion utility function and operational flexibility in the form of suspension and resumption options. We find that, with the option to delay investment, increased risk aversion facilitates investment and decreases the required investment threshold price by reducing the amount of installed capacity. We explore strategic aspects of decision making under uncertainty by examining how duopolistic competition affects the entry decisions
منابع مشابه
Optimal investment under operational flexibility, risk aversion, and uncertainty
Traditional real options analysis addresses the problem of investment under uncertainty assuming a risk-neutral decision maker and complete markets. In reality, however, decision makers are often risk averse and markets are incomplete. We confirm that risk aversion lowers the probability of investment and demonstrate how this effect can be mitigated by incorporating operational flexibility in t...
متن کاملEffect of Cognitive Biases on Rationality of Economic Decision Making under Risk among Students of Shahid Beheshti University
The purpose of this study is to determine the quality of individual economic decision making under risk and uncertainty. The research method is a quasi-experiment with single group and a post-test. The total population of the students of Shahid Beheshti University in 97 was 8.700 and due to non-normal distribution, we should use non-parametric Wilcoxon test, with sample of 180. The tool used to...
متن کاملDuopolistic competition under risk aversion and uncertainty
A monopolist typically defers entry into an industry as both price uncertainty and the level of relative risk aversion increase. The former attribute may be present in most deregulated industries, while the latter may be relevant for reasons of market incompleteness or the presence of technical uncertainty. By contrast, it has been shown that the presence of a rival hastens entry under risk neu...
متن کاملPrice Versus Production Postponement: Capacity and Competition
This article presents a comparative analysis of possible postponement strategies in a two-stage decision model where firms make three decisions: capacity investment, production (inventory) quantity, and price. Typically, investments are made while the demand curve is uncertain. The strategies differ in the timing of the operational decisions relative to the realization of uncertainty. We show h...
متن کاملUtilizing Decision Making Methods and Optimization Techniques to Develop a Model for International Facility Location Problem under Uncertainty
Abstract The purpose of this study is to consider an international facility location problem under uncertainty and present an integrated model for strategic and operational planning. The paper offers two methodologies for the location selection decision. First the extended VIKOR method for decision making problem with interval numbers is presented as a methodology for strategic evaluation of po...
متن کامل