This article investigates IT investment management processes in the U.S. and Portugal. In Portugal compared to the United States, we find less involvement of operational business users, less formalized processes, more bottom-up generation of ideas, less focus on business metrics other than financial ones, and more highly involved corporate boards. We develop a framework for understanding IT inv...

This article contributes to the debate of missing money (e.g. Joskow(2007)) which has seriously questioned the desirability of caps on scarcity prices in markets with fluctuating demand by emphasizing their potentially negative impact on firms investment decisions in the long run. A prominent example are recently liberalized electricity markets, where competition authorities have imposed caps i...

This paper presents the applications of the developed Strategic Investment Model in the Flexible Plug and Play (FPP) project to determine the optimal network investment portfolio. The Model optimises the investment in smart grid technologies such as Quadrature-boosters, DLRs, SVCs, novel protection systems to improve reverse power flow capability as well as traditional network investment in lin...

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) has been a major investment for most companies since the early nineties. ERP is a type of investment that has an integrated approach, and has been widely adopted, but there is little empirical evidence about how ERP implementation affects company performance. This chapter begins with the discussion of ERP investment and its role as a commodity or as a strategi...

We report on a set of 40 semi-structured interviews with information security executives and managers at a variety of firms and government agencies. The purpose of the interviews was to learn more about how organizations make cybersecurity investment decisions: how much support they receive to execute their mission, how they prioritize which threats to defend against, and how they choose betwee...

This paper examines irreversible investment in a project with uncertain returns, when there is an advantage to being the first to invest and externalities to investing when others also do so. We show that the possibility of pre-emption can have significant qualitative and quantitative effects on the relationship between uncertainty and investment. In a single-agent real options model, the trigg...

A fundamental role of financial markets is to gather information on firms’ investment opportunities, and so help guide investment decisions. In this paper we study the incentives for information production when prices perform this allocational role. If firms cancel planned investments following poor stock market response, the value of their shares will become insensitive to information on inves...