This paper clarifies how uncertainty affects irreversible investment in a competitive market equilibrium. With free entry, irreversibility affects the distribution of future prices, and thereby creates an opportunity cost of investing now rather than waiting. As with an imperfectly competitive firm, uncertainty can also increase the value of a marginal unit of capital. I show that with an infin...

We study investment cycles and information flows in a model of social learning in which investment returns fluctuate according to a Markov process. In our Waiting Game, agents observe the investment history and a private signal correlated with the current period’s investment return. Agents then decide whether to invest in round 1 or to delay their decision to round 2 of the current period. Casc...

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...

This paper empirically assesses United States direct investment in the European Union. In that respect, market size, growth rate, labor costs, export flows and tariff barriers have already been shown to influence U.S. foreign direct investment in the European Union. The present paper enlarges the field of knowledge on the matter by: (i) exploring the impact of two locational determinants of for...

We analyse the interaction between dividend policy and investment decision in a growth opportunity of a liquidity constrained firm. This leads us to study a mixed singular control/optimal stopping problem for a diffusion that we solve quasi-explicitly establishing connections with two auxiliary optimal stopping problems. We characterize situations where it is optimal to postpone dividend distri...

This paper presents a vendor-buyer integrated inventory model. This paper considers the problem of a vendor and buyer integrated production inventory model for the vendor and the buyer optimization model under quality improvement investment and setup cost reduction in the production system such that the total profit is maximized. The relationship between demand and price is considered as a line...

The widespread use of molecular markers to estimate parentage makes possible a new index of the opportunity for sexual selection. After demonstrating the need for a new measure, I develop one based on the upper limit on sexual selection. I describe what sets the upper limit for each sex by showing how maximum fecundity increases with number of mates, accounting for the amount of energy (or crit...