Procurement Decisions in the Airline Industry

Inhaltsangabe:Introduction: Over the last two decades, real options analysis (ROA) has become a fundamental part of project evaluation. Its increasing use in academia and corporations as well as its application to a wide range of industries make it a valuable tool in finance and accounting departments around the world. Classical capital budgeting approaches like net present value (NPV) techniques do not account for additional flexibility and are therefore a very static measurement. In addition to this, a further core factor is the strategic aspect of the investment decision. Companies often make decisions according to strategic reasons. This raises the question of how the bargaining power is divided between a seller and a buyer. Furthermore, the influence of the hold-up problem on the two involved players is analyzed. Finally, the trade surplus of the investment is divided between the seller on the one hand and the buyer on the other hand using a game theoretic approach to model this relationship. The airline industry is examined in this paper as it offers many possibilities to apply and explain the concepts of real options and bargaining in bilateral negotiations. This paper sets out to analyze the value of flexibility of an investment decision and discusses, in a second step, how the strategic power between the two parties involved is allocated. In academic literature, limited research has been done to find out about the combination of a real options analysis and the distribution of the trade surplus between the different players involved. This presents the following questions: Does an option in terms of the purchase of an aircraft have additional value in comparison to a classical and inflexible ‘buy now” decision for an airline? If this is the case, how much is this value worth and how is the trade surplus distributed between the two parties involved? Are there any hold-up problems? The following chapters will examine and answer these issues. Chapter two deals with a literature review on standard real options analysis in general and the airline sector in particular. In chapter three, background information about the airline industry is given and it is stressed why this sector is used for the capital budgeting approach. Chapter four covers the methodology that is used in chapter five. In this chapter, a case study involving the purchase decision of an aircraft is discussed using different methods to analyze the ‘commit-now” and purchase [...]