Real Options Valuation - History

History

Whereas business managers have been making capital investment decisions for centuries, the term "real option" is relatively new, and was coined by Professor Stewart Myers of the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1977. It is interesting to note though, that in 1930, Irving Fisher wrote explicitly of the "options" available to a business owner (The Theory of Interest, II.VIII). The description of such opportunities as "real options", however, followed on the development of analytical techniques for financial options, such as Black–Scholes in 1973. As such, the term "real option" is closely tied to these option methods.

Real options are today an active field of academic research. Professor Lenos Trigeorgis (University of Cyprus) has been a leading name for many years, publishing several influential books and academic articles. Other pioneering academics in the field include Professors Eduardo Schwartz (from UCLA), Gonzalo Cortazar (from PUC), Michael Brennan, and Avinash Dixit. An academic conference on real options is organized yearly (Annual International Conference on Real Options).

Amongst others, the concept was "popularized" by Michael J. Mauboussin, then chief U.S. investment strategist for Credit Suisse First Boston. He uses real options to explain the gap between how the stock market prices some businesses and the "intrinsic value" for those businesses. Trigeorgis also has broadened exposure to real options through layman articles in publications such as The Wall Street Journal. This popularization is such that ROV is now a standard offering in postgraduate finance degrees, and often, even in MBA curricula at many Business Schools.

Recently, real options have been employed in business strategy, both for valuation purposes and as a conceptual framework. The idea of treating strategic investments as options was popularized by Timothy Luehrman in two HBR articles: "In financial terms, a business strategy is much more like a series of options, than a series of static cash flows". Investment opportunities are plotted in an "option space" with dimensions "volatility" & value-to-cost ("NPVq").

Luehrman also co-authored a Harvard Business School case study, Arundel Partners: The Sequel Project, in 1992, which may have been the first business school case study to teach ROV. Interestingly, and reflecting the "mainstreaming" of ROV, Professor Robert C. Merton discussed the essential points of Arundel in his Nobel Prize Lecture in 1997. Arundel involves a group of investors that is considering acquiring the sequel rights to a portfolio of yet-to-be released feature films. In particular, the investors must determine the value of the sequel rights before any of the first films are produced. Here, the investors face two main choices. They can produce an original movie and sequel at the same time or they can wait to decide on a sequel after the original film is released. The second approach, he states, provides the option not to make a sequel in the event the original movie is not successful. This real option has economic worth and can be valued monetarily using an option-pricing model, according to Merton. See Option (filmmaking).