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Missed Opportunities: Optimal Investment Timing When Information is Costly

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  • Guthrie, Graeme

Abstract

Real option analysis typically assumes that projects are continuously evaluated and launched at precisely the time determined to be optimal, but real world projects cannot be managed in this way because of the costs of formally evaluating an investment opportunity. This paper shows that immediate investment is more attractive if evaluation costs are high or the amount of information to be revealed by an evaluation is large. The optimal delay until a reevaluation is long if evaluation costs are high or the amount of information to be revealed by an evaluation is small. The reduction in the value of project rights is especially severe when the value of the completed project is strongly mean reverting because then precision in investment timing is particularly important.

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  • Guthrie, Graeme, 2007. "Missed Opportunities: Optimal Investment Timing When Information is Costly," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 42(2), pages 467-488, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:jfinqa:v:42:y:2007:i:02:p:467-488_00
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    Cited by:

    1. Lewis Evans & Graeme Guthrie & Neil Quigley, 2012. "Contemporary Microeconomic Foundations for the Structure and Management of the Public Sector," Treasury Working Paper Series 12/01, New Zealand Treasury.
    2. San‐Lin Chung & Jr‐Yan Wang, 2018. "A simple iteration algorithm to price perpetual Bermudan options under the lognormal jump‐diffusion‐ruin process," Journal of Futures Markets, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 38(8), pages 898-924, August.
    3. Marcel Philipp Müller & Sebastian Stöckl & Steffen Zimmermann & Bernd Heinrich, 2016. "Decision Support for IT Investment Projects," Business & Information Systems Engineering: The International Journal of WIRTSCHAFTSINFORMATIK, Springer;Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. (GI), vol. 58(6), pages 381-396, December.

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