IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/rfb/journl/v04y2012i1p055-073.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Evaluating an Investment Project in an Incomplete Market

Author

Listed:
  • George Yungchih Wang

Abstract

Many studies on real options base their arguments upon the assumption that security market is complete to apply the risk-neutral valuation technique. However, when the market is incomplete, in which investment risk is not spanned by existing assets, the investor.s preferences are not risk-neutral, or management is refrained from certain trading strategies, there may exist no unique martingale price of uncertain income streams. In this paper, a dynamic-programming framework for maximizing expected utility of an investor in discrete time is presented to evaluate an investment opportunity in an incomplete market. It is suggested that certainty equivalent (CE) could be applied to value such an investment opportunity. We show that two approaches to certainty equivalent, i.e., the buying price and the selling price approaches, are exactly equal in exponential utility, implying that CE is a fair value for both the buyer and the seller in an incomplete market, subject to the degree of risk aversion. Therefore, the proposed approach, compared to other alternative approaches, is relatively intuitive and easy to apply. With the classic investment problem, it is shown that the option embedded in a project is crucial in decision-making.

Suggested Citation

  • George Yungchih Wang, 2012. "Evaluating an Investment Project in an Incomplete Market," The Review of Finance and Banking, Academia de Studii Economice din Bucuresti, Romania / Facultatea de Finante, Asigurari, Banci si Burse de Valori / Catedra de Finante, vol. 4(1), pages 055-073, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:rfb:journl:v:04:y:2012:i:1:p:055-073
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.rfb.ase.ro/articole/articol5.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Darrell Duffie & Chi-Fu Huang, 2005. "Implementing Arrow-Debreu Equilibria By Continuous Trading Of Few Long-Lived Securities," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Sudipto Bhattacharya & George M Constantinides (ed.), Theory Of Valuation, chapter 4, pages 97-127, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    2. John H. Cochrane & Jesus Saa-Requejo, 2000. "Beyond Arbitrage: Good-Deal Asset Price Bounds in Incomplete Markets," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 108(1), pages 79-119, February.
    3. Kreps, David M., 1981. "Arbitrage and equilibrium in economies with infinitely many commodities," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 8(1), pages 15-35, March.
    4. T. Clifton Green & Stephen Figlewski, 1999. "Market Risk and Model Risk for a Financial Institution Writing Options," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 54(4), pages 1465-1499, August.
    5. Robert C. Merton, 2005. "Theory of rational option pricing," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Sudipto Bhattacharya & George M Constantinides (ed.), Theory Of Valuation, chapter 8, pages 229-288, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    6. Silvers, J B, 1973. "An Alternative to the Yield Spread as a Measure of Risk," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 28(4), pages 933-955, September.
    7. Hugonnier, Julien & Morellec, Erwan, 2007. "Corporate control and real investment in incomplete markets," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 31(5), pages 1781-1800, May.
    8. Carolina Fugazza & Massimo Guidolin & Giovanna Nicodano, 2009. "Time and Risk Diversification in Real Estate Investments: Assessing the Ex Post Economic Value," Real Estate Economics, American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, vol. 37(3), pages 341-381, September.
    9. Richard G. Anderson & Jane M. Binner & Thomas Elger & Björn Hagströmer & Birger Nilsson, 2007. "Mean-variance vs. full-scale optimization: broad evidence for the U.K," Working Papers 2007-016, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
    10. Cox, John C & Ingersoll, Jonathan E, Jr & Ross, Stephen A, 1985. "An Intertemporal General Equilibrium Model of Asset Prices," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 53(2), pages 363-384, March.
    11. Harrison, J. Michael & Kreps, David M., 1979. "Martingales and arbitrage in multiperiod securities markets," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 20(3), pages 381-408, June.
    12. Jeremy Staum, 2004. "Fundamental Theorems of Asset Pricing for Good Deal Bounds," Mathematical Finance, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 14(2), pages 141-161, April.
    13. Henderson, Vicky, 2005. "Explicit solutions to an optimal portfolio choice problem with stochastic income," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 29(7), pages 1237-1266, July.
    14. Black, Fischer & Scholes, Myron S, 1973. "The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabilities," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 81(3), pages 637-654, May-June.
    15. Michael J. Brennan & Eduardo S. Schwartz, 1982. "Consistent Regulatory Policy under Uncertainty," Bell Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 13(2), pages 506-521, Autumn.
    16. James E. Smith, 1998. "Evaluating Income Streams: A Decision Analysis Approach," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 44(12-Part-1), pages 1690-1708, December.
    17. Rendleman, Richard J, Jr & Bartter, Brit J, 1979. "Two-State Option Pricing," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 34(5), pages 1093-1110, December.
    18. Cox, John C. & Ross, Stephen A. & Rubinstein, Mark, 1979. "Option pricing: A simplified approach," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 7(3), pages 229-263, September.
    19. Serra, Teresa & Goodwin, Barry K. & Featherstone, Allen M., 2011. "Risk behavior in the presence of government programs," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 162(1), pages 18-24, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Josef Schosser & Markus Grottke, 2013. "Nutzengestützte Unternehmensbewertung: Ein Abriss der jüngeren Literatur," Schmalenbach Journal of Business Research, Springer, vol. 65(4), pages 306-341, June.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Bjork, Tomas, 2009. "Arbitrage Theory in Continuous Time," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, edition 3, number 9780199574742.
    2. Lim, Terence & Lo, Andrew W. & Merton, Robert C. & Scholes, Myron S., 2006. "The Derivatives Sourcebook," Foundations and Trends(R) in Finance, now publishers, vol. 1(5–6), pages 365-572, April.
    3. Duffie, Darrell, 2003. "Intertemporal asset pricing theory," Handbook of the Economics of Finance, in: G.M. Constantinides & M. Harris & R. M. Stulz (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Finance, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 11, pages 639-742, Elsevier.
    4. repec:dau:papers:123456789/5374 is not listed on IDEAS
    5. Maria Arduca & Cosimo Munari, 2020. "Fundamental theorem of asset pricing with acceptable risk in markets with frictions," Papers 2012.08351, arXiv.org, revised Apr 2022.
    6. Maria Arduca & Cosimo Munari, 2023. "Fundamental theorem of asset pricing with acceptable risk in markets with frictions," Finance and Stochastics, Springer, vol. 27(3), pages 831-862, July.
    7. Ibáñez, Alfredo, 2008. "Factorization of European and American option prices under complete and incomplete markets," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 32(2), pages 311-325, February.
    8. Anderson, Robert M. & Raimondo, Roberto C., 2007. "Equilibrium in Continuous-Time Financial Markets: Endogenously Dynamically Complete Markets," Department of Economics, Working Paper Series qt0zq6v5gd, Department of Economics, Institute for Business and Economic Research, UC Berkeley.
    9. Suresh M. Sundaresan, 2000. "Continuous‐Time Methods in Finance: A Review and an Assessment," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 55(4), pages 1569-1622, August.
    10. Gibson, Rajna & Lhabitant, Francois-Serge & Talay, Denis, 2010. "Modeling the Term Structure of Interest Rates: A Review of the Literature," Foundations and Trends(R) in Finance, now publishers, vol. 5(1–2), pages 1-156, December.
    11. Constantinides, George M. & Jackwerth, Jens Carsten & Perrakis, Stylianos, 2005. "Option pricing: Real and risk-neutral distributions," CoFE Discussion Papers 05/06, University of Konstanz, Center of Finance and Econometrics (CoFE).
    12. Leisen, Dietmar P. J., 1999. "The random-time binomial model," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 23(9-10), pages 1355-1386, September.
    13. Jouini, Elyes, 2001. "Arbitrage and control problems in finance: A presentation," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 35(2), pages 167-183, April.
    14. Dimson, Elroy & Mussavian, Massoud, 1999. "Three centuries of asset pricing," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 23(12), pages 1745-1769, December.
    15. Mark Broadie & Jérôme Detemple, 1996. "Recent Advances in Numerical Methods for Pricing Derivative Securities," CIRANO Working Papers 96s-17, CIRANO.
    16. Dimitris Bertsimas & Leonid Kogan & Andrew W. Lo, 2001. "When Is Time Continuous?," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Marco Avellaneda (ed.), Quantitative Analysis In Financial Markets Collected Papers of the New York University Mathematical Finance Seminar(Volume II), chapter 3, pages 71-102, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    17. Perrakis, Stylianos, 1989. "Les contributions de la théorie financière à la solution de problèmes en organisation industrielle et en microéconomie appliquée," L'Actualité Economique, Société Canadienne de Science Economique, vol. 65(4), pages 518-546, décembre.
    18. Li, Minqiang, 2010. "Asset Pricing - A Brief Review," MPRA Paper 22379, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    19. Mondher Bellalah, 2009. "Derivatives, Risk Management & Value," World Scientific Books, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., number 7175, December.
    20. Carl Chiarella & Xue-Zhong He & Christina Sklibosios Nikitopoulos, 2015. "Derivative Security Pricing," Dynamic Modeling and Econometrics in Economics and Finance, Springer, edition 127, number 978-3-662-45906-5, May.
    21. Yuan Hu & W. Brent Lindquist & Svetlozar T. Rachev & Frank J. Fabozzi, 2023. "Option pricing using a skew random walk pricing tree," Papers 2303.17014, arXiv.org.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:rfb:journl:v:04:y:2012:i:1:p:055-073. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Tatu Lucian (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ffasero.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.