The investment in mutual funds has steadily increased in this decade. This growth has created a need for comprehensive and expandable financial decision support systems (DSS) that embody the knowledge of an expert in making investment decisions. This study illustrates the design and development of an intelligent, object-oriented decision support system: MFS -–Mutual Fund Selector. MFS takes int...

1 Architectural investments are large, lengthy, and risky. A decision to invest in architecture is often postponed because of difficulties to estimate its economic value and to communicate its long-term benefits. This paper proposes a method to support a decision process of architectural investments on an economic basis in industrial practice. The method combines qualitative Real Options analys...

To study the practice of investment decision-making in Estonia, first a written survey of 40 companies was carried out. More than half of respondents were found to use sophisticated (DCF-based) capital budgeting methods, which is a lower usage rate than that of large companies in western countries. This could be attributed to the short history of Estonian free market economy and the lack of app...

The beef cattle investment decision provides an excellent opportunity to increase the economic efficiency of beef cattle production. The investment questions that face beef cattle producers are of interest to beef cattle producers, educators, and financial institutions involved in lending to beef cattle producing firms. This study develops a decision support aid utilizing expert system technolo...

The decision process that organisations utilise when evaluating technology investment opportunities is a complex and even political process; however, the correct decision can provide the organisation with considerable operational and competitive benefits. The research presented in this paper presents the findings of a postal survey of the benefits provided by technology investments to large Ger...

Making well-founded security investment decisions is hard: several alternatives may need to be considered, the alternatives’ space is often diffuse, and many decision parameters that are traded-off are uncertain or incomplete. We cope with these challenges by proposing a method that supports decision makers in the process of making well-founded and balanced security investment decisions. The me...

The paper tests a political economy theory of simultaneous government decision-making on income redistribution through commodity policies and on public research investment in agriculture. We use data from 37 countries on agricultural protection and public agricultural research expenditures (PARI). The empirical results are consistent with the political economy hypotheses. The analysis suggest t...

Present paper derives fuzzy economic models to evaluate the economic feasibility of information security investment. The Net Present Value (NPV), and discounted Return on Investment (dRoI) models are proposed for the execution of costbenefit analysis. Since fuzzy results are in the form of a complex nonlinear representation, and do not always provide a totally ordered set in the same way that c...

The productivity of real-world systems is often limited by so-called bottlenecks. Hence, usually companies are not only interested in finding the best ways to schedule their current resources so that their benefits are maximized (optimization), but, in order to increase the productivity, they also conduct some analysis to find bottlenecks in their system and eliminate them in the most efficient...

This paper develops a framework to link the expected utility analysis to real options models in order to capture the joint effects of risk aversion and irreversibility associated with real investments. It aims at modifying the theory of investment under uncertainty by incorporating decision makers’ risk preferences and allows explicitly analyzing the impacts of risk aversion, uncertainty and ir...