Combining concepts from insurance and capital budgeting, the
DNPV valuation method, which is an extension of the certainty
equivalent method and equivalent to real options, has been
presented. Using this method, risk is decoupled from the time
value ofmoney and is accounted for in the numerator as a synthetic
insurance premium allowing for consistent and transparent risk
pricing. The concept of synthetic insurance is introduced within
the realm of project valuation to price the risk associated with
obtaining lower revenues or higher costs than originally expected
and these synthetic insurance products are treated as “real” costs to
the project which are then subtracted from the expected cash flows
to de-risk the estimated cash flows. Because the risks associated
with the project are accounted for by these synthetic insurance
products, the riskless cash flows can be discounted using a
risk-free rate. It is shown that DNPV is equivalent to the profit–
loss profile of a long call option position or a protective put.
Several simplified examples with a single risk source for the
revenue stream were presented to illustrate the application of
the DNPV methodology and to develop the building blocks for
a more realistic analysis. The simplified examples demonstrate
that once the risks of the cash flow streams have been
identified, riskless cash flows can be easily estimated. Because
risk is treated as a cost (i.e., an insurance premium), the
calculated cost of risk can be easily implemented in a traditional
capital budgeting application as it was demonstrated in Section 7.
More importantly, partial results (i.e., cost of risk) and final
values (i.e., DNPV) can be easily explained to decision makers.
The proposed DNPV methodology can be easily extended to
account for the different risk profiles affecting each of the sources
of revenues and/or expenditures without resorting to decision
makers' gut instincts to select an appropriate discount rate for the
project.
The introduction of probability and stochastic methods to price
the cost of risk (i.e., synthetic insurance premiums) provides
DNPV users with a direct link between traditional risk management
and financial performance. As demonstrated in the cases
analyzed and the example, the discount rates were estimated based
on the project risk profile rather than assumed heuristically as is
typically the case. This constitutes a significant step forward in the
area of financial risk management as any steps taken to mitigate a
project's potential downside can have a direct and quantifiable
impact on the project financial performance. The proposed DNPV
method will also allow managers of large corporations to mine
available data using business analytic techniques to develop risk
profiles of their revenues/expenditures that can then be used to
estimate synthetic insurance premiums, thus improving their
valuation results.
Although this procedure was initially developed to evaluate
long-term infrastructure projects (e.g., solar energy plants, wind