The theory of real options is used to incorporate the influence of uncertainty on demographic decision-making. The decision to have children is formulated as an investment using portfolio theory. The timing of the decision to have a child is modelled as a real options decision, with uncertainty affecting a woman’s ability to exercise the doption to waitT in order to delay or space births. An in...

Two pervasive features of industries experiencing rapid technological progress are uncertainty (with regard to the technological feasibility and marketabilility of an innovation) and networks (the dense web of research alliances and joint ventures linking firms to each other). This paper connects the two disparate phenomena using the notion of real options. It visualizes firms as nodes and the ...

In this paper we develop a novel valuation model and methodology to value a pharmaceutical R&D project based on real options approach. The real options approach enables the possibility of optimally abandon the project before completion whenever the investment cost turns out to be larger than the expected net cash flow stream. On the other hand, the proposed model accounts for two different sour...

We present a model integrating dynamic moral hazard and real options. A risk averse manager can exert costly hidden effort to increase productivity growth of a firm. In addition, the risk neutral owners of the firm can irreversibly increase the firms capital stock. In contrast to the literature, moral hazard may accelerate or delay investment relative to the first best depending on the severity...

Ce document a été produit dans le cadre du projet « Options réelles ». CIRANO Le CIRANO est un organisme sans but lucratif constitué en vertu de la Loi des compagnies du Québec. Le financement de son infrastructure et de ses activités de recherche provient des cotisations de ses organisations-membres, d'une subvention d'infrastructure du ministère de la Recherche, de la Science et de la Technol...

I address the interaction between accounting conservatism and real options in both a staged investment and abandonment model. An accounting policy biased towards classifying a Good (Bad) project as Bad (Good) is conservative (aggressive). The accounting signal is optimally conservative when the ex ante unconditional expected terminal value is less than the second investment (staged investment) ...

Real option valuation has traditionally been concerned with investment under project value uncertainty while assuming the agent has perfect confidence in a specific model. However, agents do not generally have perfect confidence in their model and this model uncertainty affects their decisions. In this work, we introduce a simple model for real option valuation to account for the agent’s aversi...