Real Options:A Practitioner's Guide

Tom Copeland's landmark book Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies sold in excess of 200,000 copies and was translated into more than 10 languages. The Financial Times declared that its "clarity and competence" made it "one of the best practitioners' guides to valuation." Now, Tom Copeland and Vladimir Antikarov offer the first practical tool explaining the latest state-of-the-art thinking sweeping the corporate world: real options. While option theory itself may have originated in the highly complex world of financial trading, the concept is now firmly placed within the corporate arena, as demonstrated by recent media coverage in The Economist, Business Week, and CFO Europe. Utilizing real options can transform the shifting business landscape into a strategic weapon by creating flexibility in decision making. Given the volatility of the new economy, real options are set to become the key management tool for today's businesses. In this book, the authors offer corporate decision makers the ability to assess the profitability of their ventures and decide which avenue of expansion or investment to go down and, crucially, when to take that leap. The authors take the reader on a journey through real options, from the basics of what they are and how to implement the ideas, through to more advanced topics such as options and game theory, and managing portfolios of options. Throughout the text, analogies, examples, sample problems, illustrations, and reviews are used to explain the techniques. Real Options provides expert guidance on how to implement the theory to maximize investment opportunities by utilizing uncertainty as an asset and reducing downside risk. The book will be accompanied by a website offering solutions to the end of chapter problems prepared by the authors together with a suite of real option models.