Strategic options and expert systems: a fruitful marriage

Business economics does not provide anymethodology for appraising strategic investments, relyingon informal approaches. Conversely, financial economicsoffers us plenty of sophisticated mathematical modelsunsuitable for applications and based on unrealisticassumptions. This paper presents an example of howstrategic investments may be handled with a formal buteasy-to-understand tool. While this paper shows a specificapplication, a real-life case, we think the model hereproposed may be generalized, so contributing to developinga new approach to business decisions. In particular,we think of a fuzzy expert system approach as a convenienttool overwhelming many of the shortcomingsinherent in the ‘‘crisp’’ approaches of the financial literature(DCF methods, options pricing, dynamic programming),while avoiding at the same time the refusal of anymethodology (typical of business economics). The ideahere presented develops some results by Magni et al.(2001) and Facchinetti et al. (2001). An evaluation functionis drawn up via ‘‘if-then’’ rules; the latter are made towork automatically by means of an expert system, whichadequately replicates the evaluation of human experts.A sensitivity analysis is presented to test the soundness ofthe model.