多阶段人力资本投资:基于复合实物期权理论

Multi-stage Human Capital Investments as Compound Real Options

在知识和信息时代,人力资本投资面临各种不确定因素的影响,往往具有复合实物期权特性。传统的DCF理论忽略了人力资本投资的柔性价值,并且连续型复合期权定价模型也无法适用于具有多标的资产变量和多重不确定性来源的投资。为此,本文以高等教育投资为例,借鉴决策树分析法,提出了一个基于二叉树网格法的多阶段人力资本投资的复合实物期权决策模型。实例应用表明:这一模型很好地弥补了DCF的不足,可以为不确定条件下个人人力资本投资决策提供非常清晰的逻辑分析框架和评价模型。高等教育投资蕴含着复合实物期权投资机会,因此个人接受高等教育投资是值得的。

In the era of knowledge and information, human capital investments always have some compound option features with multiple stages and sequential investments under a variety of uncertainties. While the traditional DCF theory ignores the flexible value of human capital investment, and the continuous compound option pricing model is not suitable for individual decisions in human capital investments with multiple underlying assets variables and multiple sources of uncertainty, too. Consequently, taking investments in higher education for example, the paper proposes a compound real options decision model of multi-stage individual human capital investment based on binomial lattices method after drawing lessons from the decision tree analysis method. The application case shows that the proposed discrete compound real option model has effectively made up for the inadequacies of DCF model, and can provide a very clear framework and evaluation model for multi-stage personal investments in human capital under uncertainties; Higher education investment contains the compound real options, and it is worth for the individual to accepting higher education investment.