* This is the first book on Real Options Analysis to provide practical advice on how to
use these concepts in practice.
* The author has served as a consultant providing advice on a wide variety of issues,
and has 13 years experience teaching courses on courses on real options analysis,
corporate finance, and derivative pricing. His research regularly appears in the top
economics and finance journals.
* The book is accessible to readers with a wide range of mathematical abilities, and is
written to demonstrate uses of real options analysis in the widest range of situations.
* CD included with spreadsheets intended for real-world application.
Decision makers in business and economics face a staggering array of problems. Managers
of growing firms have to decide which growth options will expand their business.
Governments have to decide which infrastructure investments to undertake. Managers of oil
firms must decide how rapidly to deplete their reserves. Owners of land must decide when
and how to develop. Operators of power plants must decide when to start them up and when
to shut them down. While these problems seem quite diverse, they share many important
features. In each case, the decision maker must choose when to take a particular action
that will be difficult, if not impossible, to reverse. In each case, the consequences of
taking (or not taking) that action are uncertain. The timing and nature of these actions
directly affect revenue.
Real options that often vary radically from one problem to another. The book focuses on
building a general approach to solving problems from the ground up to show readers how
real options can be assembled in a way appropriate to the individual problem being
analyzed. The book will inform both practitioners who want to develop their analytical
techniques and also graduate students who will eventually become practitioners.
The real-options approach to capital budgeting (and business decision-making more
generally) was introduced 30 years ago and is now widely accepted. While there are now
many books that introduce the concept of real options to a general business audience,
students and practitioners have been given little guidance as to how to actually implement
these concepts in practice.
Each book will feature a CD with spreadsheets intended for a broad range of real-world
applications.
Readership: MBA/MSc students in corporate finance, practitioners,
graduate students in finance programs
Table of Contents:
Preface
1 Introduction
I: Foundations
2: The modeling framework
3: Valuing single-period cash flows
4: Valuing multi-period cash flows
5: Combining valuation and decision making
II Component Real Options
6: Options that do not affect the state of a project
7: Simple timing options
8: Compound timing options
9: Über-compound timing options 200
10: Switching options
11: Learning options
III Calibrating the Model 293
12: Calibration using spot and futures price data 294
13: Calibration using option price data
14: Calibrating trees of alternative state variables
IV Putting the Pieces Together
15: Forestry management and valuation
16: Developing a gas field
17: Mothballing an ethanol plant
18: Where to from here?
432 pages, Hardcover