Title
Strategic capital budgeting: asset replacement under market uncertainty
Abstract
In this paper the impact of product market uncertainty on the optimal replacement timing of a production facility is studied. The existing production facility can be replaced by a technologically more advanced and thus more cost-effective one. We take into account strategic interactions among the firms competing in the product market by analyzing the problem in a duopolistic setting. We calculate the value of each firm and show that i) a preemptive (simultaneous) replacement occurs when the associated sunk cost is low (high), ii) despite the preemption effect uncertainty always raises the expected time to replace, and iii) the relationship between the probability of optimal replacement within a given time interval and uncertainty is decreasing for long time intervals and humped for short time intervals. Furthermore it is shown that result ii) carries over to the case where firms have to decide about starting production rather than about replacing existing facilities.
Year
DOI
Venue
2003
10.1007/s00291-003-0137-3
OR Spectrum
Keywords
Field
DocType
Capital budgeting,Real options,First passage time,Product market uncertainty,Cournot duopoly
Economics,Preemption,Sunk costs,Market uncertainty,Product market,Microeconomics,Capital budgeting,Game theory,First-hitting-time model,Cournot competition
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
25
4
0171-6468
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.44
1
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Grzegorz Pawlina1192.56
Peter M. Kort220544.47