Corporate investment under uncertainty and competition: A real options approach

Corporate investment opportunities can be represented as a set of (real) options to acquire productive assets. Identification of the optimal exercise strategies for these options plays a crucial role in improving the quality of capital budgeting decisions and, as a consequence, in maximizing shareholders¿ wealth. Structural changes in the economic environment, imperfect product market competition and agency conflicts across different groups of the firm¿s stakeholders make the standard option theory alone often insufficient for analyzing real investment decisions. This thesis combines option theory with non-cooperative game theory to establish some new results concerning the impact of policy uncertainty, product market interactions, and debt financing on the firm¿s optimal investment strategy.