Abstract
Although many economic variables of interest exhibit a tendency to revert to long-run levels, mean reverting processes are rarely used in investment and disinvestment models in the literature. Previous work by Sarkar (J Econ Dyn Control 28(2):377–396, 2003), that focuses on irreversible entry decisions, showed that mean reversion has three effects on investment: (a) the “variance effect” (mean reversion reduces the long-run uncertainty and thus brings closer the critical investment level), (b) the “realized price effect” (the lower variance resulting from mean reversion makes it less likely to reach extreme high or low price levels, thereby reducing the likelihood of reaching the investment trigger) and (c) the “risk discounting effect” (mean reversion lowers the required rate of return, which affects both the project value and the value of the real option to invest). Metcalf and Hassett (J Econ Dyn Control 19(8):1471–1488, 1995) and Sarkar (J Econ Dyn Control 28(2):377–396, 2003) showed that (a) and (b) work in opposite directions, essentially canceling each other out, however the effect of (c) depends on parameter values, making the overall effect (a–c) of mean reversion on entry decisions ambiguous and parameter-dependent. In this paper, we show that as far as irreversible exit decisions are concerned, the effect of mean reversion is negative: Mean reversion unambiguously lowers the rate of irreversible disinvestment/exit for reasonable parameter values, since the mean reversion in this case only affects the value of the real option to exit and not the value resulting from (real) option exercise.
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Notes
Requena-Silvente (2005) reports that close to 10 % of UK small and medium-sized exporters irreversibly withdrew from the foreign markets they operated in the 1994–1998 period. This percentage does not include firms that only temporarily ceased exporting (which were dropped from his sample). Similarly, Bernard and Wagner (2001) report that between 1990–1997, about 8 % of German exporting plants left the foreign market every year on average.
The argument in Lund (1993) is that in equilibrium, a price processes should not be unbounded from above, as the logarithmic random walk with drift clearly is, since new entry or expanded production by incumbent suppliers will induce reversion to lower price levels.
This could easily be extended to the case where the irreversible exit decision takes time to enforce, using the treatment in Majd and Pindyck (1987).
See also the discussion in ((Tsekrekos 2010, p.728 and footnote 4)).
It should be stressed that, although not apparent in the upper panel of Fig. 2 due to the scale of the graph, the mean reversion parameters \(\theta \) and \(\kappa \) significantly affect the irreversible exit/abandonment price trigger, \({\underline{P}}\). In the upper panel, output equilibrium prices of \({\underline{P}}=\left[ 1.6398, 1.67204,1.70827,1.74946\right] \) lead to abandonment for values of mean reversion speed \(\kappa =\left[ 0, 0.02, 0.05, 0.10\right] \). Stronger reversion to low levels makes the firm optimally abandon the market at higher output equilibrium prices, which is the exact opposite of what is observed in the lower panel of the Figure.
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Acknowledgments
This paper has greatly benefited from the valuable comments and suggestions made by the participants of the international workshop on “The Economics of Irreversible Choices” that was organized by the Lombardy Advanced School of Economic Research (LASER) and the DEFAP Graduate Business School in Public Economics and was hosted by the Università degli Studi di Brescia in Italy. Special thanks are due to David Schüller who acted as the discussant of the paper at the workshop, as well as to the organizers Giacomo Corneo, Luca Di Corato, Michele Moretto, Paolo Panteghini, Carlo Scarpa and last but not least Sergio Vergalli.
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Appendix A
Appendix A
In order to solve (8) subject to (9), write the homogenous part of Eq. (8) in the following form
with \(V_{H}\) representing the homogenous part.
From (Abramowitz and Stegun (1972), eq. 13.1.35), the general confluent differential equation
has general solution of the form
with \(C,D\) arbitrary constants, \(M\left( a,b,h\left( z\right) \right) \) Kummer’s confluent hypergeometric function, and \(U\left( a,b,h\left( z\right) \right) \) Tricomi’s confluent hypergeometric function given by
where \(\Gamma \left( .\right) \) is the Gamma function.
Set \(A=-\gamma \), \(f\left( z\right) =0\) and \(h\left( z\right) =\frac{2 \kappa \theta }{\sigma ^{2} z}\) in (23) to get after several algebraic computations
with general solution
Observe that if we represent \(P\) with \(z\) and \(V_{H}\left( P\right) \) with \(w\left( z\right) \), differential Eq. (22) and (26) would coincide if and only if
Solving the system of Eqs. (28) for \(a,b,\gamma \) yields two sets of solutions:
The boundary condition (9) rules out the set that depend on the positive root, say \(\gamma _{1}\), and thus the solution of Eq. (22) is
with \(\gamma \equiv \gamma _{2}=\frac{2\left( \kappa +\lambda \rho \sigma \right) +\sigma ^{2}-\sqrt{8r\sigma ^{2}+\left( -2\kappa -2\lambda \rho \sigma -\sigma ^{2}\right) }}{2\sigma ^{2}}\).
A solution to the inhomogeneous part of (8) is obviously
[see the condition in (9)]. Combining the solutions of the homogenous and inhomogeneous part, the general solution of (8) becomes
Equation (10) in the text results from Eq. (32) by doing the following: First, substitute the definition of Tricomi’s confluent hypergeometric function from (25) in (32), collect similar terms and simplify to get
with \(B,L\) constants that involve \(C,D\) and the \(\Gamma \left( .\right) \) function. To ensure the boundary condition (9), it must be that
As \(P\rightarrow +\infty \), \(\frac{2\kappa \theta }{\sigma ^{2}P}\rightarrow 0\), \(M\left( .,.,\frac{2\kappa \theta }{\sigma ^{2}P}\right) \rightarrow 1\) and thus for
to hold, it must be that \(L=0\), given that \(\gamma <0\) and \(1-b<0\) from (29).
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Tsekrekos, A.E. Irreversible exit decisions under mean-reverting uncertainty. J Econ 110, 5–23 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00712-013-0343-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00712-013-0343-7