Optimal regime switching under risk aversion and uncertainty

echnology adoption is key for corporate strategy, often determining the success or failure of a company as a whole. However, risk aversion often raises the reluctance to make a timely technology switch, particularly when this entails the abandonment of an existing market regime and entry in a new one. Consequently, which strategy is most suitable and the optimal timing of regime switch depends not only on market factors, such as the definition of the market regimes, as well as economic and technological uncertainty, but also on attitudes towards risk. Therefore, we develop a utility-based, regime-switching framework for evaluating different technology-adoption strategies under price and technological uncertainty. We assume that a decisionmaker may invest in each technology that becomes available (compulsive) or delay investment until a new technology arrives and then invest in either the older (laggard) or the newer technology (leapfrog). Our results indicate that, if market regimes are asymmetric, then greater risk aversion and price uncertainty in a new regime may accelerate regime switching. In addition, the feasibility of a laggard strategy decreases (increases) as price uncertainty in an existing (new) regime increases. Finally, although risk aversion typically favours a compulsive and a laggard strategy, a leapfrog strategy may be feasible under risk aversion provided that the output price and the rate of innovation are sufficiently high

Strategic Technology Switching under Risk Aversion and Uncertainty

Firms devising green investment strategies within a deregulated environment must take into account not only economic and technological uncertainty, but also strategic interactions due to competition. Also, further complicating green investment decisions is the fact that firms are likely to exhibit risk aversion, since alternative energy technologies entail risk that cannot be diversified. Therefore, we develop a utility-based, real options framework for pre-emptive and non-pre-emptive competition in order to analyse how economic and technological uncertainty interact with risk aversion to impact the adoption of an existing technology in the light of uncertainty over the arrival of an improved version. We confirm that greater risk aversion delays investment and show that technological uncertainty accelerates the follower’s entry, delays the entry of the pre-emptive leader, and, intriguingly, does not affect the non-pre-emptive leader’s investment decision. Also, we show how the relative loss in the leader’s value due to the follower’s entry is affected by economic and technological uncertainty as well as risk aversion, and how the risk of pre-emption under increasing economic uncertainty raises the value of direct investment in the new technology relative to stepwise investment

Hedging with Credit Derivatives and its Strategic Role in Banking Competition

The tremendous growth of markets for credit derivatives since the mid 1990's has raised questions regarding the role of these instruments in the banking industry which is heavily exposed to credit risk. However, while recent literature mainly focused on pricing and optimal decisions regarding volumes of credit derivatives the present paper centers the strategic role of these instruments in the competition between banking firms. We use a duopolistic version of the industrial organization approach to banking to find out that credit derivatives may influence banking competition. For this result to hold observability of the volume of credit derivatives held by banks is not necessary.bank, risk, duopoly, hedging

Investment decision making under uncertainty: the impact of risk aversion, operational flexibility, and competition

Traditional real options analysis addresses investment under uncertainty assuming a risk-neutral decision maker and complete markets. In reality, however, decision makers are often risk averse and markets are incomplete. Additionally, capital projects are seldom now-or-never investments and can be abandoned, suspended, and resumed at any time. In this thesis, we develop a utility-based framework in order to examine the impact of operational flexibility, via suspension and resumption options, on optimal investment policies and option values. Assuming a risk-averse decision maker with perpetual options to suspend and resume a project costlessly, we confirm that risk aversion lowers the probability of investment and demonstrate how this effect can be mitigated by incorporating operational flexibility. Also, we illustrate how increased risk aversion may facilitate the abandonment of a project while delaying its temporary suspension prior to permanent resumption. Besides timing, a firm may have the freedom to scale the investment’s installed capacity. We extend the traditional real options approach to investment under uncertainty with discretion over capacity by allowing for a constant relative risk aversion utility function and operational flexibility in the form of suspension and resumption options. We find that, with the option to delay investment, increased risk aversion facilitates investment and decreases the required investment threshold price by reducing the amount of installed capacity. We explore strategic aspects of decision making under uncertainty by examining how duopolistic competition affects the entry decisions of risk-averse investors. Depending on the discrepancy between the market share of the leader and the follower, greater uncertainty may increase or decrease the discrepancy in the non-pre-emptive leader’s relative value. Furthermore, risk aversion does not affect the loss in the value of the leader for the pre-emptive duopoly setting, but it makes the loss in value relatively less for the leader in a non-preemptive duopoly setting

Competition and Incentives

We report on two experiments that identify non-monetary incentive effects of competition. As the number of competitors increases, monetary incentives to engage in cost reduction tend to decrease. We test the hypothesis that there are non-monetary incentive effects of competition going in the opposite direction. In the experiments we change the number of competitors exogenously keeping the monetary incentives to spend effort constant. The first experiment shows that subjects spend significantly more effort in duopolistic and oligopolistic markets than in a monopoly. The second experiment focuses on social comparisons as one potential mechanism for this effect. It shows that competition turns the effort decisions of competing managers into strategic complements

Duopolistic competition with multiple scenarios and different attitudes toward uncertainty

In this paper, we address duopolistic competition when the firms have to assess the results of the interaction at different scenarios. Specifically, we consider the case in which the scenarios are identified with several states of nature and, therefore, the firms face uncertainty on their results. The probability of occurrence of the scenarios is unknown by the firms and they make their output decision before uncertainty is resolved. Within this framework, we analyze competition between firms when these firms exhibit extreme and neutral attitudes toward uncertainty with respect to the final profits. For the variety of cases that can occur, we characterize the sets of equilibria, and provide procedures to determine them. The analysis proposed can also be applied to study situations in a deterministic setting with simultaneous multiple scenarios, and to the analysis of multiple criteria duopolistic competitionJunta de Andalucía P11-SEJ-7782Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad ECO2015-68856-

Default, Credit Scoring, and Loan-to-Value: a Theoretical Analysis under Competitive and Non-Competitive Mortgage Markets

Consistent with existing literature, we first show that when borrowers?default probability on the mortgage loan is unobservable to the lender, the latter can screen borrowers by their combined choice of loan-to-value (LTV) ratio and interest rate. We further demonstrate that when borrowers also signal their default risk by acquiring a credit score, then a combined separating signaling and screening equilibrium is attained. If the signaling cost is sufficiently small, the combined signaling and screening equilibrium dominates the screening only equilibrium under both competitive and non-competitive market frameworks. However, while, under the competitive setting, borrowers benefit from constituting a credit scoring signaling system, the prospective gain is shifted to lenders under imperfect competition. Finally, we show that under both competitive and non-competitive combined signaling and screening equilibria, high and low risk borrowers, while acquiring distinct credit scores (and therefore paying different interest rates) might realize higher, lower, or identical LTV ratios. Hence, any empirical test of the relation between LTV ratio and default risk must incorporate the interrelation among the LTV ratio, credit score, and interest rate.

The optimal behaviour of firms facing stochastic costs

This paper aims at assessing the optimal behavior of a firm facing stochastic costs of production. In an imperfectly competitive setting, we evaluate to what extent a firm may decide to locate part of its production in other markets different from which it is actually settled. This decision is taken in a stochastic environment. Portfolio theory is used to derive the optimal solution for the intertemporal profit maximization problem. In such a framework, splitting production between different locations may be optimal when a firm is able to charge different prices in the different local markets.Firm behaviour, Portfolio theory, Risk aversion, Uncertainty.

Utility Functions of Equivalent Form and the Effect of Parameter Changes on Optimum Decision Making

We derive a class of utility functions that are equivalent with respect to a well-defined functional form. We study the case of constant relative risk aversion (of some order) to investigate on different equivalence relations in order to determine the, possibly infinite, number of equivalence classes when utility functions satisfy a specific form. Then we apply our results to standard applications in economics and finance, for example, to the effect of price volatility on optimum hedging. --equivalence class,risk aversion,sensitivity analysis

The Profitable Suppression of Inventions: Technology Choice and Entry Deterrence

AT&T was known for both funding a world-class research lab and delaying deployment of useful innovations from the lab. To explain this behavior we consider a model with an incumbent facing a potential entrant. The incumbent can choose from two technologies for production: old and new. The entrant's choice is limited to the old. We show that, under correlated production uncertainty, use of the common technology exposes the entrant to a greater risk. Therefore, the incumbent may suppress a newer, more efficient technology in favor of the old as a means to deter entry.