Although it is generally agreed that companies are better off with shorter manufacturing lead times, investment in lead time reduction is often difficult to justify using traditional project valuation techniques such as net present value (NPV). In this article, we suggest that evaluating...

In his seminal paper, Bruno de Finetti (1957) laid the foundations of what would become an increasingly popular branch of risk theory: the study of dividend strategies. The recent burst of research in this field encouraged the author to carry out a systematic literature review of modern...

In today's world of financial uncertainty, one major public concern is to assess (and possibly improve) the stability of companies that take on risks. Actuaries are aware of that issue for a very long time and have a great experience in modeling the activity of a risk business. During the first...

Exploiting embedded supply-chain real options creates powerful opportunities for competitive manufacturing in high-cost environments. Rather than seeking competitiveness through standardization as is common to lean production, real-options reasoning explores opportunities to use supply-chain...

We develop a real-options model for optimizing production and sourcing choices under evolutionary supply-chain risk. We model lead time as an endogenous decision and calculate the cost differential required to compensate for the risk exposure coming from lead time. The shape of the resulting...