Birth and death may be a better model than Brownian motion for many physical processes, which real options models will increasingly need to deal with. In this paper, we value a perpetual American call option, which gives the monopoly right to invest in a market in which the number of active...

We analyze the incentives of firms to delay patenting a product they intend to commercialize to maximize the period they can exploit the market under patent protection. We model the patenting and market-launching decisions and consider partial financing of these costs with debt. Agency conflicts...

The accounts of a large retailer showed statistical evidence that shrinkage (stock loss) was being measured with serious error. As a result, profit itself in many departments was seriously in error. These errors tended to wash out over large areas of the business, but at local level, serious...