Venture Business Project Valuation with the Risk Sensitive Value Measure and Both Sensitive Value Measure

Abstract

This paper attempts to evaluate risky venture business projects. The nature of risky project valuation lies in the difficulty to integrate the uncertainty of success and magnitude of cash flows generated from the project. Traditional qualitative methods tend to use arbitrary subjective measures where quantitative methods use highly uncertain cash flows and discount rate adjustments that lead to highly diverse valuation results. We propose a risk sensitive value measure (RSVM) that is known to be effective when the project includes extreme outcomes. One advantage of the RSVM is the capability to model the discount rate for cash flows and the risk aversion level separately, which leads to directly observing the relative level of aggressiveness for various projects. The sensitivity of the numerical valuation results and effectiveness of the RSVM is presented in comparison to the traditional venture business valuation methods using a numerical example.