This paper examines strategic investment between two firms that compete not only for investment timing but also for capacity under stochastic market demand. The value functions of real option for the follower, the dominant leader, and the preemptive leader are derived and their investment decisions are investigated. It finds that both firms will delay investment and the delayed margin of the follower will surpass that of the leader under greater uncertainty. Furthermore, both firms will provide more outputs in the face of increasing uncertainty and the growth rate of the follower’s capacity will exceed that of the leader’s. In addition, this paper finds that the follower will end up with a larger capacity than the leader.
The recent sluggish recovery in the U.S. house market has further motivated our research interests in overbuilding in real estate markets. Our model is an extension to Grenadier's (1996), who emphasizes rational investment decisions possibly leading to oversupply in real estate markets, by further allowing for the important implication of irrational expectation for the strategic interaction amongst competing investors. In this model, two market participants are asymmetric because one of them is allowed to have heterogeneous expectations about the growth and volatility of demand shocks. Unlike most of previous studies that only simply think of this phenomenon as a result of irrationality, our model further finds that irrational investors’ value-maximizing investment choices matter in understanding the strategic interaction of investment decisions in real estate markets, therefore providing additional insights into overbuilding and other puzzling phenomena in real estate markets.
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