Investment under Uncertainty - the Case of Repeated Investment Options

This paper considers optimal investment behaviour when investment options evolve deterministically or stochastically over time and investments are irreversible and indivisible. It extends the standard investment-under-uncertainty set-up with a single investment option to the case of repeated options. Analytical solutions are derived for the deterministic case and for the case of a geometric Brownian motion. It is argued that when investment options are repeated, the simple net-present-value rule in general fares better as an investment criterion than the rule derived from the single-option approach. Furthermore, sensitivity analyses reveal that the effects of parameter changes are very different when using the repeated-options approach instead of the single-option approach.