The Role of Real Options in Capital Budgeting: Theory and Practice1

Most discussions of capital budgeting take for granted that discounted cash flow (DCF) and real options valuation (ROV) are very different methods that are meant to be applied in different circumstances. Such discussions also typically assume that DCF is “easy” and ROV is “hard”—or at least dauntingly unfamiliar—and that, mainly for this reason, managers often use DCF and rarely ROV. This paper argues that all three assumptions are wrong or at least seriously misleading. DCF and ROV both assign a present value to risky future cash flows. DCF entails discounting expected future cash flows at the expected return on an asset of comparable risk. ROV uses “risk‐neutral” valuation, which means computing expected cash flows based on “risk‐neutral” probabilities and discounting these flows at the risk‐free rate. Using a series of single‐period examples, the author demonstrates that both methods, when done correctly, should provide the same answer. Moreover, in most ROV applications—those where there is no forward price or “replicating portfolio” of traded assets—a “preliminary” DCF valuation is required to perform the risk‐neutral valuation. So why use ROV at all? In cases where project risk and the discount rates are expected to change over time, the risk‐neutral ROV approach will be easier to implement than DCF (since adjusting cash flow probabilities is more straightforward than adjusting discount rates). The author uses multi‐period examples to illustrate further both the simplicity of ROV and the strong assumptions required for a typical DCF valuation. But the simplicity that results from discounting with risk‐free rates is not the only benefit of using ROV instead of—or together with—traditional DCF. The use of formal ROV techniques may also encourage managers to think more broadly about the flexibility that is (or can be) built into future business decisions, and thus to choose from a different set of possible investments. To the extent that managers who use ROV have effectively adopted a different business model, there is a real and important difference between the two valuation techniques. Consistent with this possibility, much of the evidence from both surveys and academic studies of managerial behavior and market pricing suggests that managers and investors implicitly take account of real options when making investment decisions.     

VALUE CREATION AT ANHEUSER-BUSCH: A REAL OPTIONS EXAMPLE

The management of Anheuser-Busch created $11.5 billion of shareholder value between 1996 and 1998, a period in which U.S. demand for beer was flat and the company's profits grew only modestly. Of that $11.5 billion, the authors estimate that nearly $10 billion can be attributed to the growth options created or expanded by the company during that period. While divesting itself of unrelated businesses, such as snack foods, Busch stadium, and the St. Louis Cardinals baseball franchise, the company began purchasing minority equity interests in brewing concerns in markets with growing demand for beer, including Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and the Philippines.
The main undertaking of the paper is to use the real options valuation method to estimate the growth option value that Anheuser-Busch has created through its investments in joint ventures in foreign markets. The authors focus specifically on a joint venture in the Argentina/Chile market, and argue that this arrangement gives the company the flexibility to invest in a complete brewing and distribution system in that market after learning about the market's potential. In other words, the joint venture creates a call option on the Argentina/Chile market. Traditional DCF analysis, which ignores the flexibility in the strategy, assigns a negative NPV to the joint venture. But explicit recognition of the "option-ality" built into the investment results in a very different valuation—as well as a plausible explanation of the growth option value in the company's stock price.
As the Anheuser-Busch example also illustrates, valuation of the real option depends critically on the assumption about the volatility of the future value of the investment projects. The authors provide an intuitively useful way for managers to examine their own volatility assumptions—one that draws on the probability assessments that are part of the well-known Black-Scholes model.     

REAL OPTIONS PRIMER: A PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS OF CONCEPTS AND VALUATION APPROACHES

Strategic capital investment decisions are being made every day in an increasingly uncertain world. While the traditional NPV approach does a reasonable job of valuing simple, passively managed projects, it does not capture the many ways in which a highly uncertain project might evolve, and the ways in which active managers will influence this evolution. In cases where managerial flexibility is a major source of strategic value, companies will want to use real options valuation methods.
This article serves as a managerial tutorial on this newer, less understood approach. It uses simple examples to illustrate the essence of four basic categories of real options—timing, growth, production, and abandonment. The examples begin by taking a "binomial" approach to option valuation, in which the value of an investment initiative is allowed to take on two possible future values. Besides being used to illustrate the distinctive features of a real option, the binomial approach also serves to help the reader understand the alternative Black-Scholes valuation approach (though without requiring the reader to master the complex mathematics underlying Black-Scholes). Basic instructions for implementing both approaches are provided, along with a discussion of how to set appropriate discount rates and the important role of volatility assessment in the valuation process.     

Valuation of a Developmental Drug as a Real Option

Valuing a capital investment as a real option (or series of options) has advantages over standard DCF valuation when the investment creates the future flexibility to delay, abandon, or expand an element of the project based on the resolution of a major source of uncertainty. The uncertainty is generally dealt with using a “volatility” term that aims to reflect the variability in the future value of the underlying asset. But there are certain situations in which the uncertainty has a second dimension. For example, drugs in development can be abandoned either because of bad technical outcomes (the drug doesn't work) or unfavorable resolutions of market risk (though the drug works, its market potential turns out to be too limited). In an article published earlier in this journal, the authors illustrated the valuation of an early‐stage pharma R&D investment using a real options approach in which the market and technical risks were folded together into the volatility parameter. In this article, the authors explain why they have concluded that this is an incorrect approach and then show how to handle market and technical risk as two separate dimensions of risk in valuing an R&D program. The potential use of this technique extends beyond pharma and biotech R&D to any situation in which the outcome of an important uncertainty is independent of the resolution of market risk associated with the underlying asset.     

基于实物期权理论的企业设计创新投资时机研究

产品的设计创新已经成为企业培养和维持核心竞争优势的关键。已有文献较少基于经济管理的视角来探讨不确定条件下企业设计创新所具有的实物期权特性,且传统的 DCF 无法对管理决策柔性做出科学的评价。为此,根据实物期权理论,构建企业设计创新的投资时机模型,并利用案例证明该模型的科学性和可行性。结果表明,企业在 DCF 分析的同时,应充分考虑企业设计创新的投资期权价值,把握最佳投资时机,实现科学决策。     

Managing Operational Flexibility in Investment Decisions: The Case of Intel

Significant attention has been paid to how real options analysis can help in valuing operating flexibility when making major capital investment decisions. But there has been far less study of how to manage such flexibility, particularly in cases where a decision to defer, contract, or expand any one investment program affects a range of other programs, including those outside the firm. Such interrelated investments are increasingly common in a "connected" economy where products and technologies are designed across firms and industries.
Based on a field study at Intel, this paper describes and analyzes one set of practices for coordinating such diverse systems of investments. It shows how information about interrelated investments is communicated within and between companies so that coherent changes can be made at the level of an overall system. The authors argue that studies of investment appraisal need to move beyond the predominant focus on valuation to encompass the wider organizational processes by which operational flexibility is exercised in the modern economy.     

Brealey,Myers, and Allen on Real Options

Real options are valuable sources of flexibility that are either inherent in, or can be built into, corporate assets. The value of such options are generally not captured by the standard discounted cash flow (DCF) approach, but can be estimated using a variant of financial option pricing techniques. This article provides an overview of the basics of real option valuation by examining four important kinds of real options:

• 1 The option to make follow‐on investments. Companies often cite “strategic” value when taking on negative‐NPV projects. A close look at the payoffs from such projects reveals call options on follow‐on projects in addition to the immediate cash flows from the projects. Today's investments can generate tomorrow's opportunities.
• 2 The option to wait (and learn) before investing. This is equivalent to owning a call option on the investment project. The call is exercised when the firm commits to the project. But often it's better to defer a positive‐NPV project in order to keep the call alive. Deferral is most attractive when uncertainty is great and immediate project cash flows—which are lost or postponed by waiting—are small.
• 3 The option to abandon. The option to abandon a project provides partial insurance against failure. This is a put option; the put's exercise price is the value of the project's assets if sold or shifted to a more valuable use.
• 4 The option to vary the firm's output or its production methods. Companies often build flexibility into their production facilities so that they can use the cheapest raw materials or produce the most valuable set of outputs. In this case they effectively acquire the option to exchange one asset for another.

The authors also make the point that, in most applications, real‐option valuation methods are a complement to, not a substitute for, the DCF method. Indeed DCF, which is best suited to and usually sufficient for safe investments and “cash cow” assets, is typically the starting point for real‐option analyses. In such cases, DCF is used to generate the values of the “underlying assets”—that is, the projects when viewed without their options or sources of flexibility.     

THE PROMISE OF REAL OPTIONS

In recent years, both practitioners and academics have argued that traditional discounted cash flow models do a poor job of capturing the value of the options embedded in many corporate actions. This paper shows how option pricing models used in valuing financial assets can be used to value three kinds of real options that are often built into corporate projects: the option to delay, the option to expand, and the option to abandon. As a number of examples in this paper suggest, corporate investments that would be rejected using conventional DCF analysis can sometimes be justified by the value of the strategic options they provide. As the illustrations also show, however, the pricing of real options is considerably more difficult than the pricing of financial options and adjustments must often be made to capture the complexity of real investments.     

Valuing Assets Using Real Options: An Application to Deregulated Electricity Markets

This paper provides a detailed case of the application of real options valuation techniques to value a contract for the use of a power generation facility. The authors' aim is not primarily to offer a valuation "recipe" for a specific type of asset, but to show how the real options framework can be actually made to work in a variety of situations.
The case illustrates how minor adaptations that take into account the ways in which actual settings differ from the assumptions of standard formulas like Black-Scholes can be used to increase the precision and realism of results. By introducing relatively simple changes to a standard options valuation model, the authors obtain results that are reasonably close to those reported for actual transactions involving similar types of assets. Despite the industry-specific context of the analysis, the applicability of the techniques discussed in the paper should extend beyond the energy industry to other contexts characterized by similar types of uncertainty and production process, particularly those associated with minerals and other commodities.     

Realizing the Potential of Real Options: Does Theory Meet Practice?

The idea of viewing corporate investment opportunities as “real options” has been around for over 25 years. Real options concepts and techniques now routinely appear in academic research in finance and economics, and have begun to influence scholarly work in virtually every business discipline, including strategy, organizations, management science, operations management, information systems, accounting, and marketing. Real options concepts have also made considerable headway in practice. Corporate managers are more likely to recognize options in their strategic planning process, and have become more proactive in designing flexibility into projects and contracts, frequently using real options vocabulary in their discussions. Thanks in part to the spread of real options thinking, today's strategic planners are more likely than their predecessors to recognize the “option” value of actions like the following: ? dividing up large projects into a number of stages; ? investing in the acquisition or production of information; ? introducing “modularity” in manufacturing and design; ? developing competing prototypes for new products; and ? investing in overseas markets. But if real options has clearly succeeded as a way of thinking, the application of real options valuation methods has been limited to companies in relatively few industries and has thus failed to live up to expectations created in the mid‐ to late‐1990s. Increased corporate acceptance and implementations of real options valuation techniques will require several changes coming together. On the theory side, we need more realistic models that better reflect differences between financial and real options, simple heuristic methods that can be more easily implemented (but that have been carefully benchmarked against more precise models), and better guidance on implementation issues such as the estimation of discount rates for the “optionless” underlying projects. On the practitioner side, we need user‐friendly real options software, more senior‐level buy‐in, more deliberate diffusion of real options knowledge throughout organizations, better alignment of managerial incentives with long‐term shareholder value, and better‐designed contracts to correct the misalignment of incentives across the value chain. If these challenges can be met, there will continue to be a steady if gradual diffusion of real options analysis throughout organizations over the next few decades, with real options eventually becoming not only a standard part of corporate strategic planning, but also the primary valuation tool for assessing the expected shareholder effect of large capital investment projects.     

Making real options really work

As a way to value growth opportunities, real options have had a difficult time catching on with managers. Many CFOs believe the method ensures the overvaluation of risky projects. This concern is legitimate, but abandoning real options as a valuation model isn't the solution. Companies that rely solely on discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis underestimate the value of their projects and may fail to invest enough in uncertain but highly promising opportunities. CFOs need not--and should not--choose one approach over the other. Far from being a replacement for DCF analysis, real options are an essential complement, and a project's total value should encompass both. DCF captures a base estimate of value; real options take into account the potential for big gains. This is not to say that there aren't problems with real options. As currently applied, they focus almost exclusively on the risks associated with revenues, ignoring the risks associated with a project's costs. It's also true that option valuations almost always ignore assets that an initial investment in a subsequently abandoned project will often leave the company. In this article, the authors present a simple formula for combining DCF and option valuations that addresses these two problems. Using an integrated approach, managers will, in the long run, select better projects than their more timid competitors while keeping risk under control. Thus, they will outperform their rivals in both the product and the capital markets.     

Financial Management Association Roundtable on Stock Market Pricing and Value‐Based Management

A group of academics and practitioners addresses a number of questions about the workings of the stock market and its implications for corporate decision‐making. The discussion begins by asking what the market wants from companies: Is it mainly just steady increases in earnings per share, which are then “capitalized” by the market at the current industry P/E multiple to produce a higher stock price? Or does the market pay attention to the “quality,” or sustainability, of earnings? And are there more revealing measures of annual corporate performance than GAAP earnings—measures that would provide investors with a better sense of companies' future cash‐generating capacity and returns on capital? The consensus was that although many investors respond uncritically to earnings numbers, the most sophisticated and influential investors consider far more than current earnings when pricing stocks. And although the stock market is far from omniscient, the heightened scrutiny of companies resulting from the growth of hedge funds, private equity, and investor activism of all kinds appears to be making the market “more efficient” in building information into stock prices. The second part of the discussion explored the implications of this view of the market pricing process for corporate strategy and the evaluation of major investment opportunities. For example, do acquisitions have to be “EPS‐accretive” to be value‐adding, or is there a more reliable means of assessing an investment's value added than pro forma EPS effects? Does the DCF valuation method always offer a better guide to value than the method of comparables used by many Wall Street dealmakers? And under what circumstances are the relatively new real options valuation approaches likely to provide a significant advantage over conventional methods? The main message offered to corporate practitioners is to avoid letting cosmetic accounting effects get in the way of value‐adding investment and operating decisions. As the corporate record on acquisitions makes painfully clear, there is no guarantee that an accretive deal will turn out to be value‐increasing (in fact, the odds are that it will not). As for choosing a valuation method, there appears to be a time and place for each of the major methods—comparables, DCF, and real options—and the key to success is understanding which method is best suited to the circumstances.     

Valuation of Corporate Innovation and the Pricing of Risk in the Biopharmaceutical Industry: The Case of Gilead

Much of a firm's market value derives from expected future growth value rather than from the value of current operations or assets in place. Pharmaceutical companies are good examples of firms where much market value comes from expectations about drugs still in the development “pipeline.” Using a new osteoporosis drug being developed by Gilead Sciences, Inc., the author combines discounted cash flow methods values and real option models to value it. Alone, discounted cash flow (DCF) calculations are vulnerable to the assumptions of growth, cost of capital, and cash flows. But by integrating the real options approach with the DCF technique, one can value a new product in the highly regulated, risky and research‐intensive Biopharmaceutical industry. This article shows how to value a Biopharmaceutical product, tracked from discovery to market launch in a step‐by‐step manner. Improving over early real option models, this framework explicitly captures competition, speed of innovation, risk, financing need, the size of the market potential in valuing corporate innovation using a firm‐specific measure of risk and the industry‐wide value of growth operating cash flows. This framework shows how the risk of corporate innovation, which is not fully captured by the standard valuation models, is priced into the value of a firm's growth opportunity. The DCF approach permits top‐down estimation of the size of the industry‐wide growth opportunity that competing firms must race to capture, while the contingency‐claims technique allows bottom‐up incorporation of the firm's successful R&D investment and the timing of introduction of the new product to market. It also specifically prices the risk of innovation by modeling its two components: the consumer validation of technology and the expert validation of technology. Overall, it estimates the value contribution per share of a new product for the firm.     

The Gap between the Theory and Practice of Corporate Valuation: Survey of European Experts

The valuation of companies or their assets is at the heart of most financing and investment decisions. Over the last five decades, academics have developed several simple and sophisticated models for corporate valuation. Yet valuation estimates of a firm or its assets appear to vary widely among practitioners. It is unclear whether these differences arise from practitioners' use of different valuation models or from differences in their assumptions about the inputs used in those models. To provide some insights into this issue, the authors recently surveyed 365 European finance practitioners with CFAs or equivalent professional degrees. They find that almost all survey respondents use the Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) model (along with some version of Relative Valuation that relies on the use of “comparables”). But the estimation methods of such practitioners for almost all inputs in the DCF model, including beta, the equity market risk premium, leverage, cost of debt, and terminal value, vary widely. This can be a serious problem because even small differences in inputs can cause huge variations in valuations. Such differences arise primarily because theory provides little guidance on how to estimate parameters, leaving practitioners to make their own assumptions and judgments. In sum, the authors' findings suggest that the process of estimating valuation parameters can be as important as the choice of the valuation model itself, and requires the serious attention of academics and practitioners. The authors recommend that key valuation parameter estimates be disclosed in financial and valuation reports. Their findings are also relevant to policy makers because the concept of “fair value” plays such a central role in post‐crisis regulation.     

Multiple State Property Options

Before taking strategic actions in property investments, consider the type and number of expansion, contraction and suspension alternatives and the future profit volatility. The optimal investment strategy for a current or prospective property owner should reflect the expected variability of future profits (rent times occupancy times units available), and current profits relative to threshold trigger profits for a variety of alternative states and actions. These alternatives include remaining idle, building and operating properties, expanding, contracting, suspending, reverting to normal service or reduced service capacity, or abandoning. A valuation model is developed for up to eight different options, each with a distinct trigger. Then numerical solutions show optimal profit triggers and valuations for each of these real options. Generally, increasing the number of options reduces the investment and abandonment triggers, and increases the values of the investment option and total option values, given these alternatives and parameters. The relevant parameters will depend on the investment context and feasible actions, but generally include interest rates, profit volatility, and irrecoverable costs of investment, expansion, contracting, suspension and abandonment. Generally increases in investment costs reduce the value of upward options, and increases the optimal triggers for exercising those options. Increases in expected profit volatility increase the value of all options, increases investment triggers and decreases abandonment triggers. These generic models may be appropriate for many contexts where the costs of changing states are partially irrecoverable, yet where management has some flexibility to alter scale, quality and pricing of assets and services.     

Equilibrium Models in Real Estate Research: A Survey

Equilibrium analysis is a valuable tool in real estate investment research. In this survey, I show how equilibrium models have been used to estimate the required risk premium for different classes of real estate, to explain real house prices, and to determine investment rental market adjustment and valuation (as well as to predict future rent, price, and value developments). Equilibrium analysis has also increased our understanding of differences in coupon or rental rates on loans or leases with and without various optionlike features. Because the work on leases has lagged that on loans or mortgages, application of the mortgage research methodology to leases is an especially fertile area for research.     

Real Asset Valuation: A Back‐to‐basics Approach

Different valuation methods can lead to different corporate investment decisions, and the conventional “static, single discount rate” DCF approach in particular is biased against many of the kinds of decisions that corporate managers tend to view as “strategic.” Reducing the bias from valuations involves two main tasks: treating risk in a way that is consistent with observed market pricing, and accounting for the ability of companies to make decisions “dynamically” over time. The authors propose two separate tools, market‐based valuation and complete decision tree analysis, for accomplishing these two improvements in valuation. The authors also suggest working with the full distribution of future cash flows, one possible realization at a time, rather than working with the aggregate measure of expected cash flow. From a technical perspective, it is necessary to work with the full distribution to value real options properly. Valuing the cash flows one realization at a time also leads to a much better understanding of the interaction between economy‐level, systematic risks and local asset‐level, technical risks. Just as important, the proposed approaches support an effective division of labor between local asset managers, who are better positioned to model technical considerations and other asset specifics, and the central finance staff, who can ensure the consistent treatment of economy‐wide risk and to create the rules of engagement for evaluating opportunities. After presenting an overview of both the valuation and the organizational issues, the authors present a case involving a corporate investment in carbon capture and storage that illustrates both the application of the proposed methods and the various sources of bias in the typical DCF analysis.     

Corporate taxes,capital structure,and valuation: Combining Modigliani/Miller and Miles/Ezzell

The valuation of a firm with discounted cash flow (DCF) approaches requires assumptions about the firm’s financing strategy. The approaches of Modigliani and Miller and Miles and Ezzell assume that either a passive debt management with predetermined debt levels or active debt management with capital structure targets is applied. Over the last decades, various extensions of these approaches have been developed to allow for a more realistic depiction of financial decision making. However, recent empirical analyses indicate that current theories still have limited power to explain large variances in capital structure across time. We provide an alternative explanation for the empirical observation by assuming that firms combine both capital structure targets and predetermined debt within future periods, and we show how to value a firm given such a partially active debt management. The approaches of Modigliani and Miller and Miles and Ezzell are embedded into a common valuation framework, with the familiar valuation formulas shown as special cases. In a simulation analysis, we illustrate that the textbook valuation formulas may produce considerable valuation errors if a firm applies a partially active debt management.     

Real Options Analysis: Where Are the Emperor's Clothes?

Once a topic of interest only to finance specialists, real options analysis now receives active, mainstream attention in business schools and industry. This article provides practitioners with a critical review of five well-established real options approaches that are extensively documented in the academic and professional literature. These approaches include the "classic approach" and "revised classic approach" (as proposed by Martha Amram and Nalin Kulatilaka), the "subjective approach" (as proposed by Tim Luehrman), the "MAD Approach" (as proposed by Tom Copeland and Vladimir Antikarov), and the "integrated approach" (as proposed by James Smith and Robert Nau). The article discusses the assumptions, mechanics, and potential range of applications of each approach, along with the results when applied to a simple case involving development of a natural gas field.
While the approaches share a focus on investment flexibility and shareholder value, they rely on fundamentally different assumptions, use significantly different techniques, and can produce dramatically different results. Consequently, a great deal of thought must go into selecting and applying them in practice. The revised classic approach appears to be best suited to cases dominated either by "market" risk or "private" risk alone, and where approximate results are acceptable and resources are limited. The integrated approach is best suited to cases with a mix of market and technological risks, and where accuracy and a management roadmap are critical.     

Valuing and pricing IPOs

This paper investigates how underwriters set the IPO firm’s fair value, an ex-ante estimate of the market value, using a unique dataset of 228 reports from French underwriters. These reports are issued before the IPO shares start trading on the stock market and detail how underwriters determined fair value. We document that underwriters often employ multiples valuation, dividend discount models and discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis to determine fair value but that all of these valuation methods suffer from a positive bias with respect to equilibrium market value. We also analyze how this fair value estimate is subsequently used as a basis for IPO pricing. We report that underwriters deliberately discount the fair value estimate when setting the preliminary offer price. Part of the intentional price discount can be recovered by higher price updates. We find that, controlling for other factors such as investor demand, part of underpricing stems from this intentional price discount.