Project Flexibility Agency And Competition

While most approaches to capital budgeting have used discounted cash flow valuation techniques, recent attention has been given to the valuation of "real options" to look at capital budgeting decisions and project management. Real options are a measure of the value of managerial flexibility and strategic value in capital investment. Because this topic is important but not yet covered adequately, "Innovation, Infrastructure and Strategic Options" fills a major gap in the market. This text deals with issues of R & D and technology options, investments involving learning, infrastructure, competition, strategy, and growth options.

A new paradigm for balancing flexibility and commitment in management strategy through the amalgamation of real options and game theory. Corporate managers who face both strategic uncertainty and market uncertainty confront a classic trade-off between commitment and flexibility. They can stake a claim by making a large capital investment today, influencing their rivals' behavior, or they can take a “wait and see” approach to avoid adverse market consequences tomorrow. In Competitive Strategy, Benoît Chevalier-Roignant and Lenos Trigeorgis describe an emerging paradigm that can quantify and balance commitment and flexibility, “option games,” by which the decision-making approaches of real options and game theory can be combined. The authors first discuss prerequisite concepts and tools from basic game theory, industrial organization, and real options analysis, and then present the new approach in discrete time and later in continuous time. Their presentation of continuous-time option games is the first systematic coverage of the topic and fills a significant gap in the existing literature. Competitive Strategy provides a rigorous yet pragmatic and intuitive approach to strategy formulation. It synthesizes research in the areas of strategy, economics, and finance in a way that is accessible to readers not necessarily expert in the various fields involved.

This text addresses a wide range of issues in valuation using the Real Options technique. It covers the whole area of Real Options and looks closely at developments, especially in valuing technology companies. Authors in Europe, North and South America, Asia and Africa provide seven Real Options models and applications.

The brief will describe how to develop a risk analysis applied to a project , through a sequence of steps: risk management planning, risk identification, risk classification, risk assessment, risk quantification, risk response planning, risk monitoring and control, process close out and lessons learning. The project risk analysis and management process will be applied to large engineering projects, in particular related to the oil and gas industry. The brief will address the overall range of possible events affecting the project moving from certainty (project issues) through uncertainty (project risks) to unpredictability (unforeseeable events), considering both negative and positive events. Some quantitative techniques (simulation, event tree, Bayesian inference, etc.) will be used to develop risk quantification. The brief addresses a typical subject in the area of project management, with reference to large engineering projects concerning the realization of large plants and infrastructures. These projects are characterized by a high level of change, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. The brief represents an extension of the material developed for the course Project Risk Analysis and Management of the Master in Strategic Project Management (Erasmus Mundus) developed jointly by Politecnico di Milano, Heriot Watt University (Edimburgh) and Umea (Sweden). The brief may be used both in courses addressing project management subjects and by practitioners as a guide for developing an effective project risk management plan.

Modern option pricing theory was developed in the late sixties and early seventies by F. Black, R. e. Merton and M. Scholes as an analytical tool for pricing and hedging option contracts and over-the-counter warrants. How ever, already in the seminal paper by Black and Scholes, the applicability of the model was regarded as much broader. In the second part of their paper, the authors demonstrated that a levered firm's equity can be regarded as an option on the value of the firm, and thus can be priced by option valuation techniques. A year later, Merton showed how the default risk structure of cor porate bonds can be determined by option pricing techniques. Option pricing models are now used to price virtually the full range of financial instruments and financial guarantees such as deposit insurance and collateral, and to quantify the associated risks. Over the years, option pricing has evolved from a set of specific models to a general analytical framework for analyzing the production process of financial contracts and their function in the financial intermediation process in a continuous time framework. However, very few attempts have been made in the literature to integrate game theory aspects, i. e. strategic financial decisions of the agents, into the continuous time framework. This is the unique contribution of the thesis of Dr. Alexandre Ziegler. Benefiting from the analytical tractability of contin uous time models and the closed form valuation models for derivatives, Dr.

For several decades, the orthodox economics approach to understanding choice under risk has been to assume that each individual person maximizes some sort of personal utility function defined over purchasing power. This new volume contests that even the best wisdom from the orthodox theory has not yet been able to do better than supposedly naïve models that use rules of thumb, or that focus on the consumption possibilities and economic constraints facing the individual. The authors assert this by first revisiting the origins of orthodox theory. They then recount decades of failed attempts to obtain meaningful empirical validation or calibration of the theory. Estimated shapes and parameters of the "curves" have varied erratically from domain to domain (e.g., individual choice versus aggregate behavior), from context to context, from one elicitation mechanism to another, and even from the same individual at different time periods, sometimes just minutes apart. This book proposes the return to a simpler sort of scientific theory of risky choice, one that focuses not upon unobservable curves but rather upon the potentially observable opportunities and constraints facing decision makers. It argues that such an opportunities-based model offers superior possibilities for scientific advancement. At the very least, linear utility – in the presence of constraints - is a useful bar for the "curved" alternatives to clear.

Volume 1A covers corporate finance: how businesses allocate capital - the capital budgeting decision - and how they obtain capital - the financing decision. Though managers play no independent role in the work of Miller and Modigliani, major contributions in finance since then have shown that managers maximize their own objectives. To understand the firm's decisions, it is therefore necessary to understand the forces that lead managers to maximize the wealth of shareholders.

Volume 1 of the Encyclopedia of Financial Models The need for serious coverage of financial modeling has never been greater, especially with the size, diversity, and efficiency of modern capital markets. With this in mind, the Encyclopedia of Financial Models has been created to help a broad spectrum of individuals ranging from finance professionals to academics and students understand financial modeling and make use of the various models currently available. Incorporating timely research and in-depth analysis, Volume 1 of the Encyclopedia of Financial Models covers both established and cutting-edge models and discusses their real-world applications. Edited by Frank Fabozzi, this volume includes contributions from global financial experts as well as academics with extensive consulting experience in this field. Organized alphabetically by category, this reliable resource consists of thirty-nine informative entries and provides readers with a balanced understanding of today's dynamic world of financial modeling. Volume 1 addresses Asset Pricing Models, Bayesian Analysis and Financial Modeling Applications, Bond Valuation Modeling, Credit Risk Modeling, and Derivatives Valuation Emphasizes both technical and implementation issues, providing researchers, educators, students, and practitioners with the necessary background to deal with issues related to financial modeling The 3-Volume Set contains coverage of the fundamentals and advances in financial modeling and provides the mathematical and statistical techniques needed to develop and test financial models Financial models have become increasingly commonplace, as well as complex. They are essential in a wide range of financial endeavors, and the Encyclopedia of Financial Models will help put them in perspective.