This dissertation considers fundamental questions about real options reasoning and its application in the face of uncertainty: do firms behave as real options reasoning predicts, and are there performance benefits from its application? The concept of uncertainty is further developed by...

The disastrous events of 2011—an earthquake and a nuclear accident, a major accounting scandal at a well-known company, and an unusual current account deficit—have brought Japan back into the international news. Although China and other countries in Asia have grown faster and gained greater...

We consider a simple model of a pump-assisted hydroelectric facility operating in a market with time-varying but deterministic power prices and constant water inflows. The engineering details of the facility are described by a model containing several parameters. We present an algorithm for...

Ethanol crush spreads are used to model the value of a facility which produces ethanol from corn. A real option analysis is used to investigate the effects of model parameters on the related managerial decisions of (i) how to operate the facility through optimal switching from idled to...

The "standard" Merton formulation of optimal investment and consumption involves optimizing the integrated lifetime utility of consumption, suitably discounted, together with the discounted future bequest. In this formulation the utility of consumption at any given time depends only on the...

Landsberg's notion of disorder, entropy normalized to maximum entropy, was originally proposed for the Shannon information-theoretic entropy to overcome extensivity-based deficiencies of entropy as a measure of disorder. We generalize Landsberg's concept to three classes of extended entropies:...