Strategic Capital Budgeting: Asset Replacement Under Uncertainty

We consider a firm's decision to replace an existing production technology with a new, more cost-efficient one.Kulatilaka and Perotti [1998, Management Science] nd that, in a two-period model, increased product market uncertainty could encourage the firm to invest strategically in the new technology.This paper extends their framework to a continuous-time model which adds flexibility in timing of the investment decision.This flexibility introduces an option value of waiting which increases with uncertainty.In contrast with the two-period model, despite the existence of the strategic option of becoming a market leader due to a lower marginal cost, more uncertainty always increases the expected time to invest.Furthermore, it is shown that under increased uncertainty the probability that the firm finds it optimal to invest within a given time period always decreases for time periods longer than the optimal time to invest in a deterministic case.For smaller time periods there are contrary effects so that the overall impact of increased uncertainty on the probability of investing is in this case ambiguous.