About Referential and Consecutive Underlying Instruments of Real Options

Since 1990s real options analysis (ROA) has been perceived as the alternative to the discounted cash flow method. The ROA approach, enabling more accurate valuation of real assets and formulating reasonable strategy for the companies, has attracted the increased interests not only among the academics but also in the industry. The increase of desirability of the ROA approach is caused not only by pros of the method but also with last modifications in its algorithm that substantially simplify the calculus. The most popular and widespread procedure of the ROA uses gross present value, PV, as the underlying asset of real options. Unfortunately, such approach involves several theoretical problems - the PV usually has not any twin assets that neither would be quoted in stock exchanges nor traded publicly. The paper refers to the mentioned questions concreting the concept of an underlying instrument of real options and demonstrating that the PV asset should be modeled in indirect manner