Ebook: Technology Investment: A Game Theoretic Real Options Approach

This chapter is organized as follows. The economic problem on which this book focuses is motivated in Section 1. The two tools used to study this economic problem, which are real options theory and game theory, are discussed in Sections 2 and 3, respectively. Section 4 surveys the contents of this book. In Section 5 some promising extensions of the research presented in this book are listed. 1. TECHNOLOGY INVESTMENT Investment expenditures of companies govern economic growth. Es­ pecially investments in new and more efficient technologies are an impor­ tant determinant. In particular, in the last two decades an increasing part of the investment expenditures concerns investments in informa­ tion and communication technology. Kriebel, 1989 notes that (already) in 1989 roughly 50 percent of new corporate capital expenditures by major United States companies was in information and communication technology. Due to the rapid progress in these technologies, the tech­ nology investment decision of the individual firm has become a very complex matter. As an example of the very high pace of technological improvement consider the market for personal computers. IBM intro­ duced its Pentium personal computers in the early 1990s at the same price at which it introduced its 80286 personal computers in the 1980s. Therefore it took less than a decade to improve on the order of twenty times in terms of both speed and memory capacities, without increasing the cost (Yorukoglu, 1998).

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The technology investment decision of an individual firm has become a very complex matter in recent years. One reason is the incredibly rapid progress of technological developments in the last decades. Another reason is the existence of and movement towards oligopolistic markets. In this book, several theoretical and technology investment models of the firm are developed and analyzed. To solve these models real options theory and game theory is used. The real options theory makes it possible to explicitly take into account (and value) the option value of waiting. Game theory is used to incorporate strategic interactions. Technology Investment extends the already existing real options models by the introduction of game theory. The game theory, or more specifically, the theory of timing games, is extended by the inclusion of stochastics.