Part 1: Organizational Capital Budgeting Model (OCBM)
Capital budgeting is a contentious subject in both research and managerial practice. Financial economists such as Brealy & Myers advocate using NPV and related quantitative approaches that comprise...
Part 1: Organizational Capital Budgeting Model (OCBM)
Capital budgeting is a contentious subject in both research and managerial practice. Financial economists such as Brealy & Myers advocate using NPV and related quantitative approaches that comprise what we refer to as the standard capital budgetting model (SCBM); by contrast, strategy scholars such as Bower have argued that socio-political conflicts interfere with such financially-oriented capital budgeting methods and often render them ineffective. We reconcile these competing views by extending the behavioral theory of the firm (BTF) - particularly the notions of Knightian uncertainty and controversy that are central to the BTF - to encompass capital budgeting methodologies. In doing so, we develop a more general organizational capital budgeting model (OCBM) that incorporates traditional capital budgeting theories along with consideration of the firm's organizational processes and the degree of uncertainty underlying the assumptions that firms must make in their capital budgetting activities. Fourteen structured qualitative case studies of capital budgeting projects in Korean Chaebols provide evidence that the traditional arguments apply at particular levels of uncertainty and controversy: For low Knightian uncertainty and low controversy, the financially-oriented SCBM works well; under high Knightian uncertainty and high controversy, firms instead turn to more qualitative socio-political methodologies. We then complete the uncertainty and controversy matrix with two other combinations: High Knightian uncertainty and low controversy (which we label the plausibility approach), plus low Knightian uncertainty and high controversy (the negotiation approach). The OCBM broadens the traditional capital budgeting model and helps explain firms' heterogeneous choices of capital budgeting approaches.
Part 2: Controversy reduction in portfolio management
The existing literature about portfolio management has investigated how to update a portfolio allocation, conditional on the information that possibly predicts asset returns and volatilities. We add several innovations to fill the lacuna of prior research in the contexts of global asset allocation. First, we suggest a simple method of how to rebalance portfolios automatically and dynamically in order to exploit potential market inefficiencies. The existing literature has not developed such a strategy. Out-of-sample tests demonstrate that our strategy dominates both static allocation and dynamic strategies that do not account for possible mispricing. Thus, our strategy can contribute not only to academia, but also to practical portfolio managers who endeavor to beat markets. Second, we elaborate portable alpha strategies using the new dynamic strategy. Once we add an alpha portfolio to existing portfolios, then they perform better in terms of mean and risk. Thus, it makes our alpha portfolio portable, i.e., we can apply the alpha portfolio to any fund and can enhance its performance. Third, our dynamic strategy implies a convenient method to estimate a conditional mean and covariance matrix as functions of predictive information while ensuring positive definiteness of the covariance matrix without consuming much computational power. Such estimation strategy can be useful to practical risk managers and traders who need to control the risks of large target portfolios on a real time basis.
This paper applies organizational capital budgeting model (OCBM) to portfolio allocation in relation to portable alpha strategy. Portable alpha strategy is one way to address internal controversy of asset management firms. Controversy is a key variable in OCBM. I discard the detailed discussion about OCBM in order to sell this paper as a finance article, but will provide it upon request.