Real Options; Managerial Flexibility and Strategy in Resource Allocation

Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996. Later printing. Hardcover. Very good/very good. xiii, [5], 427, [3] pages. Illustrations. Formulae. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Lenos Trigeorgis is the Bank of Cyprus Chair Professor of Finance in the School of Economics and Management, University of Cyprus. He is considered a leading authority on capital budgeting and strategy, having pioneered the field of real options, and having authored several books on related topics. He has taught at many of the world's top universities including Boston University, MIT, Columbia University, UC Berkeley, London Business School, and the University of Chicago. He has published in numerous journals, and serves on the editorial boards of several journals. He is also President of the Real Options Group (ROG), a boutique strategy consulting firm focusing on real options valuation. Every year since 1997, ROG has organized the Annual International Conference on Real Options. Prof. Trigeorgis is the author of Real Options [4] (MIT Press, 1996) and co-authored Strategic Investment (Princeton University Press, 2004), and Competitive Strategy (MIT Press, 2012). With Michael Brennan, he edited Project Flexibility, Agency, and Competition (Oxford University Press, 1999), and, with Eduardo Schwartz, Real Options and Investment Under Uncertainty (MIT Press, 2001). He received his D.B.A. from Harvard University in 1986. In the 1970s and the 1980s, developments in the valuation of capital-investment opportunities based on options pricing revolutionized capital budgeting. Managerial flexibility to adapt and revise future decisions in order to capitalize on favorable future opportunities or to limit losses has proven vital to long-term corporate success in an uncertain and changing marketplace. In this book Lenos Trigeorgis, who has helped shape the field of real options, brings together a wealth of previously scattered knowledge and research on the new flexibility in corporate resource allocation and in the evaluation of investment alternatives brought about by the shift from static cash-flow approaches to the more dynamic paradigm of real options -- an approach that incorporates decisions on whether to defer, expand, contract, abandon, switch use, or otherwise alter a capital investment. Comprehensive in scope, Real Options reviews current techniques of capital budgeting and details an approach (based on the pricing of options) that provides a means of quantifying the elusive elements of managerial flexibility in the face of unexpected changes in the market. Also discussed are the strategic value of new technology, project interdependence, and competitive interaction. The ability to value real options has so dramatically altered the way in which corporate resources are allocated that future textbooks on capital budgeting will bear little resemblance to those of even the recent past. Real Options is a pioneer in this area, coupling a coherent picture of how option theory is used with practical insights in into real-world applications.