INVESTMENT EVALUATION OF TRANSPORTATION INFRASTRUTURE PROJECTS USING BINOMIAL REAL OPTION MODEL

Transportation infrastructure is critical to economic growth of a country such as China. Careful evaluation of investments in traffic infrastructure projects is therefore pertinent. As traditional evaluation methods do not consider the uncertainty of future cash flows and mobility during project execution, the real option approach is gradually gaining recognition in the context of valuing construction and infrastructure projects. However, many of the cases only evaluate individual options separately although multiple options often exist in a typical large infrastructure project. Using a highway project in China as a case study, this paper first evaluates a deferment option and a growth option embedded in the project. Subsequently, the values are combined using the fuzzy analytical hierarchy process. It is found that the combined value is less than the sum of the two option values. This finding is consistent with the theoretical observations given in past real option literature despite the use of a different approach.