We present a real options model of a firm's make-or-buy decision under demand uncertainty. "Making" is subject to decreasing returns to scale, fixed costs and capital investment. "Buying" happens at a fixed price and requires no investment. Three distinct procurement regimes endogenously arise:...

An entrepreneur faces non-diversifiable business risk and liquidity constraints. We provide a unified framework that embeds these frictions to study interdependent business start-up/entry, capital accumulation/asset sales, portfolio allocation, consumption/saving, and business exit decisions....

This study identifies several interrelated reasons why firms' depreciation method choice is likely to influence managers' capital investment decisions. We find that firms that use accelerated depreciation make significantly larger capital investments than firms that use straight-line...

We analyze a continuous-time stochastic control problem that arises in the study of several important issues in financial economics. An agent controls the drift and volatility of a diffusion output process by dynamically selecting one of an arbitrary (but finite) number of projects and the...

This paper explores the relationship between dynamic consistency and the existing notions of unambiguous events for Choquet expected utility preferences. A decision maker is faced with an information structure represented by a filtration. We show that the decision maker's preferences respect...

This paper explores the effect of personality traits on: (1) the willingness to make risk-taking decisions on behalf of a group, (2) the nature of "choice shifts", i.e. the difference between the amount of risk taken in the group context and individually. Openness and agreeableness emerge as...

We analyse the all-pay auction with incomplete information and variance-averse bidders. We characterise the symmetric equilibrium for general distributions of valuations and any number of bidders. Variance aversion is a sufficient assumption to predict that high-valuation bidders increase their...

This paper considers how optimal education and tax policy depends on the risk properties of human capital. It is demonstrated that a key feature of human capital investments is whether they increase or decrease wage risk. In a benchmark model it is shown that this feature alone determines...

Consider a simple two-state risk with equal probabilities for the two states. In particular, assume that the random wealth variable Xi dominates Yi via ith-order stochastic dominance for i = M,N. We show that the 50-50 lottery [XN + YM, YN + XM] dominates the lottery [XN + XM, YN + YM] via (N +...

The prior paper in this sequel, Pope (2009) introduced the concept of a nominalist heuristic, defined as a focus on prominent numbers, indices or ratios. In this paper the concept is used to show three things in how scientists and practitioners analyse and evaluate to decide (conclude). First,...