An Empirical Test of Optimism Bias in Capital Budgeting Decisions

Behavioral finance is a field that is scrutinizing the adequacy of traditional financial theories using insights from the disciplines of psychology and sociology. Many studies within its realm test the stock market behaviors, and behavioral phenomena are still to be tested in the area of corporate finance. This study aims to contribute to the behavioral corporate finance literature by a research in one of the psychological phenomena affecting the decision makers＇ abilities to reach conclusions rationally. In this study, it is aimed to investigate one of the biases, namely, the optimism bias in corporate capital budgeting decisions. Optimism in decision making can be associated with estimating lower costs and higher revenues. Thus, by assessing the forecasts of decision makers, the existence of optimism in their decisions is tried to be seen. This study aims at contributing to the literature in that it is conducted in an emerging country like Turkey.

Dependent-Chance Programming Models for Capital Budgeting in Fuzzy Environments

Capital budgeting is concerned with maximizing the total net profit subject to budget constraints by selecting an appropriate combination of projects. This paper presents chance maximizing models for capital budgeting with fuzzy input data and multiple conflicting objectives. When the decision maker sets a prospective profit level and wants to maximize the chances of the total profit achieving the prospective profit level, a fuzzy dependent-chance programming model, a fuzzy multi-objective dependent-chance programming model, and a fuzzy goal dependent-chance programming model are used to formulate the fuzzy capital budgeting problem. A fuzzy simulation based genetic algorithm is used to solve these models. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the simulation-based genetic algorithm and the potential applications of these models.

An improved portfolio optimization model for oil and gas investment selection

For oil company decision-makers,the principal concern is how to allocate their limited resources into the most valuable opportunities.Recently a new management philosophy,＂Beyond NPV＂,has received more and more international attention.Economists and senior executives are seeking effective alternative analysis approaches for traditional technical and economic evaluation methods.The improved portfolio optimization model presented in this article represents an applicable technique beyond NPV for doing capital budgeting.In this proposed model,not only can oil company executives achieve trade-offs between returns and risks to their risk tolerance,but they can also employ an ＂operational premium＂ to distinguish their ability to improve the performance of the underlying projects.A simulation study based on 19 overseas upstream assets owned by a large oil company in China is conducted to compare optimized utility with non-optimized utility.The simulation results show that the petroleum optimization model including ＂operational premium＂ is more in line with the rational investors＇ demand.

The Analysis and Modification of Opportunity Cost of Investment

We think we should use basic return rate of industry to measure the opportunity cost of capital and use the rule of Maximum NPV （Net Present Value） to modify the wrong solution in the book.