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Efficient? Chaotic?
W hat’s the N ew
Finance?
by Nancy A. Nichols
Harvard Business Review
Reprint 93208
This document is authorized for use only by OMAR CAMARA ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact
[email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies.
In Question
Perspectives on business issues-in-progress
Rational investors, beta, CAPM –
everything they taught you in business
school is now open to debate.
Efficient? Chaotic?
W hat’s the N ew
Finance?
by Nancy A. Nichols
Day after day, CFOs and investors
alike make decisions based on the
principles of modern financial theory. Developed in the decades after
World War II, these theories began as
isolated academic concepts. Today
they shape our corporations. The assumptions they make about the behavior of investors has influenced
everything from capital budgeting
decisions to CEO compensation.
The conclusions they draw spawned
a whole school of management that
focuses on giving shareholders their
due. Indeed, these theories have become such an essential part of doing
business that one finance textbook
urged students to tattoo their prescriptions on their foreheads.
At the root of these theories is the
belief that all business is quantifiable and that markets can be studied
scientifically. Yet today – some 20
years later – that belief is under attack from all sides: from those who
say finance uses the wrong scientific
paradigm to those who say finance
isn’t a science at all but an art. Individually, these groups could be discounted. Together, they represent a
sizable body of dissent.
Ironically, one of the strongest attacks is coming from a man who
helped launch modern finance, University of Chicago Professor Eugene
Fama. His newest research has cast
doubt on the validity of a widely
used measure of stock volatility –
beta. A second group of critics is
looking for a new financial paradigm;
they believe it will emerge from the
study of nonlinear dynamics and
chaos theory. A third group, however, eschews the scientific approach
altogether, arguing that investors
aren’t always rational and that managers’ constant focus on the markets
is ruining corporate America. In
their view, the highly fragmented
U.S. financial markets do a poor job
of allocating capital and keeping
tabs on management. What U.S. corporations need, they say, are longterm investors similar to those that
exist in Germany and Japan.
As these various views suggest,
the current debate over the future of
finance is part of a larger argument
about the right form of capitalism in
a global economy. Nor is this debate
simply academic: for just as the powerful ideas that have shaped modern
finance have dominated the way
business has been done in the latter
part of the twentieth century, these
new ideas may shape the way business will be done in the twenty-first
century. Therefore, the most important question for us is: What is the
new finance?
Modern Finance
Under Attack
Behind both the pragmatic and the
philosophical attacks on modern financial theory are two phenomena:
the globalization of the financial
markets and the technological firepower of their participants. Together
they have made the benchmarks and
yardsticks that used to matter to
managers far from certain.
Take a simple thing like credit ratings. In the United States, Sara Lee
is far from an AAA credit, while in
Switzerland, Sara Lee securities
trade as though they were AAA rated. In practice, therefore, the same
securities have two different prices,
despite the fact that current theory
tells us there is only one equilibrium
price or value for a company’s stock.
Such incongruous real-world examples and the growing skepticism
of academics have led people to
question modern financial theory in
general and the efficient market hypothesis and the Capital Asset Pricing Model in particular. Both took
root in the 1960s and 1970s, and
both are deeply embedded in the
way U.S. companies do business – in
everything from the way pension
funds are invested to the way corporations invest for the future.
In Capital Ideas: The Improbable
Origins of Modern Wall Street, Peter
Bernstein writes about the men and
the milieu in which these ideas
became dogma. What his engaging
history demonstrates are the longstanding links between science and
finance. The technology has become
a lot more sophisticated than it was
when turn-of-the-century investors
studied long, hand-drawn charts of
the movements of stocks, trying to
Nancy A. Nichols is senior editor
at HBR, where she covers finance,
health care, and women’s issues.
Copyright © 1993 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW March-April 1993
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discern a message in their fluctuations much as gypsies read tea
leaves. But the impulse was similar
to what led later theorists to hypothesize that stock prices move randomly, much the way molecules do
in space. Over time, this scientific
concept was translated into the financial world, where it became
known as the random walk down
Wall Street.
It was Eugene Fama, a third-generation Italian-American from Boston,
who formalized this concept. His 70page dissertation, written at the
University of Chicago, was first published in the Journal of Business in
1965 and was subsequently published in an abridged form in both
the Financial Analysts Journal and
Institutional Investor magazine.
Fama’s theory rocked Wall Street,
first and foremost because he told a
group of speculators that there was
no way to beat the markets. Even
those who got lucky, he warned,
wouldn’t be able to sustain their advantage over the long run. Why not?
According to Fama, information
flows swiftly into the market, where
it reaches investors who react immediately. Their decisions to buy or
sell drive prices quickly to a point
where stocks are fully valued. Thus
only unforeseen events can affect
those prices. But random events are
as likely to affect stock prices positively as negatively. Therefore, there
are no clear trends in the movement
of stocks. Instead, they follow the
path of a drunken sailor.
Implicit in Fama’s hypothesis are
two important ideas: first, that investors are rational; and second, that
rational investors trade only on new
information, not on intuition, the
advice of their mothers-in-law, or
the movements of the stars. Or as
the finance jocks might say, there
are enough smart money traders on
Wall Street to make sure that prices
reflect fairly the value of a company’s assets. Noise traders, while they
are necessary for the markets to
function, don’t dominate them.
The belief that investors are rational gave rise to another pillar of
modern finance, the Capital Asset
Pricing Model. CAPM presumes
that rational investors will seek a
On the New Finance
Capital Ideas: The Improbable
Origins of Modern Wall Street
by Peter L. Bernstein
New York: The Free Press, 1992.
“The Cross-Section of
Expected Stock Returns”
by Eugene F. Fama and
Kenneth R. French
Journal of Finance
June 1992.
Sense and Nonsense
in Corporate Finance
by Louis Lowenstein
New York: Addison-Wesley
Publishing Company, Inc., 1991.
“Who’s Minding the Store?”
by Robert J. Shiller
The Report of the Twentieth
Century Fund Task Force on
Market Speculation and
Corporate Governance
New York: The Twentieth Century
Fund Press, 1992.
The Eudaemonic Pie
by Thomas A. Bass
New York: Penguin Books, 1985.
Chaos and Order in the Capital
Markets
by Edgar E. Peters
New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.,
1991.
“Positive Feedbacks in the
Economy”
by W. Brian Arthur
Scientific American
February 1990.
premium for risky investments and
sets out to define the risk premium
of one stock in relation to others.
The model attempts both to predict
market behavior and to serve as
a tool to help corporate managers
invest in those projects that Wall
Street will value positively. William
Sharpe, one of CAPM’s creators, ultimately won a Nobel Prize for his
work. But it all began back when he
was in graduate school studying
with Harry Markowitz, the father of
portfolio theory.
Portfolio theory has become such
an article of faith among investors
that its central idea , which is that
an investor who diversifies will do
better than an investor who doesn’t,
now seems obvious.
Yet Markowitz’s simple observation spawned a whole new wave of
investment products – including the
index fund – once it was set alongside the efficient market theory that
told investors there was no way
to beat the market. The logic is
straightforward: if it isn’t possible to
beat the market, then a sensible investor will simply hold the market –
that is, come up with a basket of
stocks that in some way represents
all the market’s upside potential
while trying to diversify away all
downside risks. Markowitz theorized that investors could diversify
away all sorts of risks, including
business-cycle risk and interest-rate
risk. But what they couldn’t diversify away was the risk that comes
with holding stocks in general.
At Markowitz’s suggestion, therefore, Sharpe set out to take the next
step in the theory: to define the
unique risk of holding stocks in general and then to judge the risk of any
one stock in relation to the market
as a whole. Beta is the measure of
the volatility of one stock in relation
to the market as a whole. By convention, beta is set at 1.00, so stocks
with high volatility – riskier stocks –
have betas above 1.00, while less
volatile stocks, commonly believed
to be less risky, have betas lower
than 1.00.
Sharpe’s model has been controversial since its inception. Beta has
been pronounced dead, revived, and
pronounced dead again many times.
Yet even as the academic world debated whether beta was the appropriate measure of risk, the corporate
world embraced it. CAPM is now
taught in business schools and accepted in boardrooms across the
country. Its assumptions, prescriptions, and calculations are embedded in countless computers nationwide.
Together these three concepts, the
efficient market hypothesis, portfolio theory, and CAPM, have had
a profound impact on how the financial markets relate to the companies
they seek to value. They have driven
3
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come up with hurdle rates that are
then used to make decisions. Since
companies with high volatility – and
high betas – are judged to be riskier investments by the market, the
projects they invest in must produce a higher rate of return than
Fama’s Second Revolution
those of companies whose stocks
show less volatility.
In recent years, however, these
To show the destructive potential
concepts have come under attack.
of such thinking, LowenFirst, a young scholar
stein cites his experience as
named Steve Ross develBeta has been pronounced
a director at Liz Claiborne.
oped a multifactor moddead, revived, and pronounced
Pegged early on as a growth
el similar to the CAPM
stock, Claiborne’s stock
that he claimed did a betdead many times.
price was highly volatile.
ter job of predicting the
When the garment industry
markets. Next, theorists
took a downturn in 1988, for exambegan to see certain anomalies in the
are highly controversial. Critics have
ple, the company’s earnings fell only
data. Armed with better and faster
attacked Fama’s and French’s method4%, but its stock tanked – falling
computers, they were able to repliology and accused them of churning
60% from the previous year’s high.
cate in days or even hours what had
their data endlessly until they found
Such volatility had given the stock a
once taken years on a mainframe.
something – anything. Even worse,
beta of 1.60, which led to a correWhat did they find? Stocks do better
some people have charged that they
spondingly high hurdle rate. Accordin January, for instance, and small
are hoping to profit from their work
ing to the CAPM, any investment
capitalization stocks tend to do betby putting together a fund based on
the company made would require a
ter than large capitalization stocks –
their findings. Now other scholars
very high payoff rate to adjust for the
two situations that shouldn’t exist if
are reportedly hard at work on parisky nature of the company’s busithe efficient market hypothesis porpers that purportedly will prove the
ness.
trayed the stock market accurately.
opposite – that beta is indeed the
Yet Lowenstein and company
So rampant was the debate surright measure of risk. The result is
CFO Samuel M. Miller weren’t conrounding his hypothesis that Fama
an academic holy war unlikely to be
vinced the high rate was justified. So
published a 35-page review of the atresolved soon.
when they evaluated the company’s
tacks and affirmations of the theory
The Revisionists
decision to create an entirely new
in the J o u r n a l o f F i n a n ce on the
line of clothing for large-sized womtwentieth anniversary of its original
These controversial empirical
en, they looked at the fundamentals
publication.
findings come on top of much critiof the business, not at CAPM. “ManThen, in a subsequent issue of the
cism of the CAPM. Leading the
agement ignored the beta,” Lowensame journal, Fama concluded deciattack is Louis Lowenstein, a
stein writes, which might have told
sively that beta was the wrong meaColumbia University professor and
them not to invest in what turned
sure of risk. Others had said it. Informer CEO of Supermarkets Generout to be a very profitable venture
deed, empirical evidence had been
al. In his book Sense and Nonsense
that opened up a whole new market
showing up since the mid-1980s. But
in Corporate Finance, Lowenstein
for the company.
when one of the founders of modern
contends that the CAPM conNow, imagine that it isn’t just
finance spoke up– or perhaps gave in
tributes directly to America’s comone company but entire industries
to the force of the evidence – people
petitiveness problem. According to
whose investment horizons are
listened. So even though it was the
Lowenstein, U.S. managers have
bounded by the CAPM, and you see
efficient market hypothesis that
been not only misled but also bullied
why the markets are often scapemade Fama famous, it is his most reby CAPM into making “safe” ingoated as the cause of America’s
cent work that has made headlines.
vestments with clear, short-term reshort-termism. As Lowenstein arWriting in the June 1992 issue of
turns instead of investing for the
gues in an eloquent attack, CAPM
the Journal of Finance, Fama and his
long term and competing on a grand
“fixes too high a cost of capital for
colleague at the University of Chiscale. CAPM may have been just
some companies that should be encago, Kenneth French, launched
a model to the theorists, but many
couraged to reinvest more freely, it
a forceful attack on the nearly 30managers have taken it to heart.
fixes far too low a cost of capital for
year-old Capital Asset Pricing ModIndeed, managers concerned with
others, and it gets the right number
el. Their conclusion: the model does
creating value for their shareholders
for still others only by coincidence.”
not describe the last 50 years of averhave used the model to make hunMost recently, Lowenstein worked
age stock returns. In other words,
dreds of investment decisions. By
with Yale Professor Robert J. Shiller
beta is the wrong measure of risk.
plugging their company’s beta into a
on a blue ribbon commission orgaAnd if beta is not the appropriate
cost of capital calculation, managers
the investment models of a generation of money managers. They have
derailed and blessed countless investment projects. And they have
given rise to such controversial
products as index funds.
predictor of risk, then perhaps risk
is not related to returns in the way
financial theorists have predicted
for two decades. That would mean
either that the markets are not efficient in the way we have understood
them to be or that the Capital Asset
Pricing Model is the wrong model.
Or both.
Not surprisingly, these findings
4
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IN QUESTION
Thurow and Harvard Business
from 2081 to 1738, in two hours
nized by The Twentieth Century
School’s Michael Porter, who are eaand forty-five minutes. Says Shiller,
Fund to address the public policy
ger to insulate managers from the
“There is no good economic reason
problems inherent in this issue. The
markets’ often uncertain signals.
why the nation’s corporate equity
Task Force on Market Speculation
should have lost nearly a sixth of its
and Corporate Governance took a
The Chaos Cabal
value in less than three hours . . . it
hard look at the markets and Ameriappears that what happened on that
ca’s underinvestment problem and
When Shiller and other revisionday is old-fashioned speculative panconcluded that something was
ists look at trends, feedback loops,
ic. People began to fear that because
askew.Their background report
and speculating investors, they see
of the fears of other investors, stock
written by Shiller and titled “Who’s
arguments for renovating U.S. capiMinding the Store?” repretalism. Another group of
sents the thinking of a
critics look at the same
Critics contend that CAPM
group that Institutional Inphenomena and see chaos.
vestor magazine dubs “the
Like earlier market theocontributes directly to America ’s
revisionists.” They don’t
rists, the chaos school becompetitiveness problem.
advocate throwing out the
gins with science, drawing
theories that make up modon cutting-edge work in
ern finance, but they sure would like
physics, math, and computers. But
prices would crash, and in effect
to tinker with them.
instead of working with the rigid scithey created the crash in an effort to
For Shiller and other “revisionentific paradigm of the past, they are
get out of the market.”
ists,” the markets have somehow
using new mathematical techniques
To sum up, markets are more
become unhinged from the businessto view the markets as complex and
complex than theories would suges they are trying to value. Modern
evolving systems. At the heart of
gest. They are made up of human infinance may not be the only cause of
their search is the belief that you can
vestors who behave, well, like huthis fissure, but it doesn’t take an
unlock the secrets of any situation if
mans. In Shiller’s behavioral model,
enormous leap of faith to see how
you can get the right perspective.
bubbles occur and bubbles burst, as
the ideas it espouses contributed to
Take a simple traffic accident. If
they did in October 1987. “Since we
the problem.
you get in your car and follow your
are dropping the notion that everyThe argument is simple: if the efnormal route to work but then turn
one is completely rational, the tenficient market hypothesis says that
a corner and collide with another
dency of a bubble to grow depends
everything is priced efficiently at
car, the accident seems random to
on investors’ variable tendencies,”
equilibrium and the CAPM claims
you. Yet if you were watching the
Shiller writes. “Investors may enter
all that matters is a stock’s beta,
two cars from a helicopter overhead,
buy orders so that they can profit
then it follows that all stocks with
the collision would seem inevitable.
from future price increases, thereby
the same beta are fungible. Investors
Physicists and mathematicians bec a u s i n g further price increases.
are as likely to be successful buying
lieve that, properly observed, apparThese further price increases may
an indexed fund as they are buying
ently random events like the moveencourage yet more investors into
a retailer or a biotech company with
ments of stock prices will show
the market and so on: a feedback
the same beta. Indeed, stocks are
themselves to be, if not predictable,
loop–that is, a vicious circle–creates
simply another commodity to be
then at least decipherable.
an upward trend in prices; the bubbought and sold. This type of reasonYet unlike automobiles, stock
ble grows.”
ing implies that trading stocks is
prices are likely to move nonlinearSuch a scenario is impossible in a
more like speculating than investly – that is, not in a straight trajectocompletely efficient market. And if
ing – especially when it is accompary either upward or downward. And
the markets are not pricing stocks
nied by the volatility created by prounlike our simple car accident,
efficiently, then they are sending the
gram traders and arbitrageurs.
stock prices are likely to exhibit
wrong message to companies and
In part, this argument reflects
what scientists call multidimenfailing to allocate capital properly.
a backlash against the casino culture
sionality: many factors are affecting
As a result, both Shiller and Lowenof the 1980s. Reviewing the taketheir movements at any one time; in
stein would like to see investors foover activity that was rampant then
the case of the stock market, there
cus more on company fundamenand the sometimes wildly inflated
are potentially as many factors as
tals. If a company’s current investors
prices that were paid for assets,
there are investors.
are incapable of doing so, then manShiller takes a skeptical view of the
Two of the best known chaos theagers ought to seek out “relational
efficient market theory. His blunt
orists are Doyne Farmer and Norinvestors,” long-term investors like
assessment: real world financial
man Packard. They are the heroes of
those in the German and Japanese
markets do not follow textbook
Thomas Bass’s cult classic The Eusystems who understand the comparules. If they did, events like the
daemonic Pie. Today they are grapny’s real value for the long term. The
crash of October 19, 1987 would be
pling with the commodities market,
Twentieth Century Fund Task Force
impossible. On that day, the Dow
but their adventures in chaos began
thus joins a growing group of obJones Industrial Average fell 16.5%,
in Las Vegas with a by now legendservers, including MIT Dean Lester
5
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ary attempt at beating the house
at roulette.
Roulette is a system that demonstrates a sensitive dependence to initial conditions, a critical component
in chaotic systems and a fancy way
of saying that where the ball lands
depends on how it is fired. But unlike the stock market, there are only
a small number of factors that affect
the game of roulette: the force with
which the wheel is spun, the friction
it encounters, the tilt of the wheel,
the scatter and bounce of the ball,
the divets lying along the track the
ball takes. All these things combine
to send the ball into orbit and help
it find its ultimate destiny – be it
red or black, even or odd. And all
these things can be measured, which
means that an equation can be written to specify where the ball will
land. Not exactly, of course, but
close enough to bet on.
In the mid-1970s, Farmer and
Packard set out to write those equations. Then they built computers
they could program with their toes
to receive specific data about any
particular wheel. (The computers
sent vibrations to different parts of
their bodies to tell them where to
bet.) Since their twitching and toe
wiggling didn’t exactly make them
look like James Bond at the tables,
their elaborate plan soon ran afoul of
the thugs that casino owners pass off
as pit bosses and security guards. But
they went home a little bit richer
and a great deal smarter, having
proven that it was possible to predict, with some margin of error, the
results of a game even Einstein
hadn’t thought predictable.
After selling their system to a few
die-hard professional gamblers,
Farmer and Packard returned to
graduate school, where they applied
their ideas to more traditional academic pursuits. Packard eventually
became a professor at the University
of Illinois, Farmer went on to become a physicist and a group leader
at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Recently, however, they’ve begun to
apply their sizable intelligence to
gaming another nonlinear dynamic
system – the commodities markets.
In fact, Farmer and Packard believe
by endlessly churning out a long
6
“People began
to fear that
because of the
fears of other
investors, stock
prices would
crash, and in
effect they
created the
crash in an
effort to get out
of the market. ”
series of equations, they may eventually unlock the secrets of the
markets – just as they uncovered the
secrets of roulette.
If all this sounds a bit far afield
from traditional finance, it is. But it
is also an idea that is generating a lot
of interest in that big Casino in the
East – Wall Street. The New York Society of Securities Analysts recently
held a full-day symposium on chaos.
In the audience were representatives
of a few of the better known houses
on the Street and more than a few of
the quirky investors that “new”
ways to game the market always attract. Among the lecturers were the
best and the brightest “rocket scientists,” as well as some amateur
philosophers discussing good and
evil. The subject of the luncheon
talk was wide-ranging: “The Great
Debate: Are Markets Chaotic or Rational? Can They Be Both?” While
none of the participants were quite
sure what the answer was, the belief
is growing that nonlinear thinking
may present a way out of the academic holy wars over markets efficiency, beta, and the “right” kind
and number of investors on the corporate board.
Many of the conference participants arrived clutching a popular
new book entitled Chaos and Order
in the Capital Markets by Boston
money manager Edgar Peters – who
was, ironically enough, once a student of Harry Markowitz. Peters argues that chaos theory may indeed
hold the key for creating a new kind
of market paradigm, one that treats
the market like a complex interdependent system. He writes in his
introduction, “The efficient market
hypothesis assumes that investors
are rational, orderly, and tidy. It is a
model of investment behavior that
reduces the mathematics to simple
linear differential equations, with
one solution. However, the markets
are not orderly or simple. They are
messy and complex.”
Still, most chaos theorists retain
enough belief in the EMH that they
do not want to go public with their
esoteric trading strategies lest everyone try to do what they’re doing and
eat away at their allegedly astronomical returns. But despite their
excitement over their discoveries,
none of the chaos theorists believe
that a new market paradigm or a
new model for making investment
decisions will blossom full-blown
soon from their studies.
What chaos theory may do, however, is help managers think about
investments in new ways, outside
the rigid numerical frameworks of
the old paradigm. Brian Arthur is
part of the chaos cabal that works
out of the Santa Fe Institute in New
Mexico, a ragtag group of physicists,
mathematicians, and economists
once led by Doyne Farmer. His article in the February 1990 issue of
Scientific American, ”Positive Feedbacks in the Economy,” starts with
the hypothesis that the knowledgebased parts of the economy – computers, pharmaceuticals, missiles,
aircraft, telecommunications – may
follow different economic rules than
traditional sectors such as agriculture and mining. Knowledge-based
products require large investments
in research and development, but as
a rule, incremental manufacturing is
then relatively cheap. So pioneers
can take advantage of the learning
acquired in the early stages of manufacturing to garner market share and
sizable profits later.
Moreover, Arthur argues, these
sectors may actually be affected by a
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
March-April 1993
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[email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies.
IN QUESTION
system of increasing, rather than decreasing, returns. In such a system,
once a product gets ahead – by design
or chance – it tends to stay ahead and
even to increase its lead. The dominance of VHS technology over beta
technology is one example of this
form of economic Darwinism. “Both
systems were introduced at about
the same time,” Arthur writes, “and
so began with roughly equal market
shares; those shares fluctuated early
on because of exter nal circumstance, luck and corporate maneuvering. Increasing returns on early
gains eventually tilted the competition towards VHS.”
If Arthur’s analysis is correct, then
managers ought to look for situations in which they can create or
capitalize on early market advantages – small investments, products,
or strategies that might lead to larger, long-lasting advantages such as
those VHS now enjoys. But these are
the very situations that traditional
investment models such as the
CAPM have trouble valuing. So in
the future, the decision to invest
may not be solved by any equation
but rather by people asking a simple
question: If I make this investment
today, will it create new opportunities, learning possibilities, or other
advantages tomorrow?
While there are a number of new
financial techniques, such as optionpricing strategies, available to help
managers quantify investment decisions, they are a long way from the
simple paradigms and linear equations that theorists delivered to us
in the 1950s. On the one hand, that
may be appropriate. Tidy as the solutions the CAPM and the efficient
market hypothesis offer up may be
in a global economy, there is no one
number nor single answer that is
sure to work anymore.
On the other hand, the problem
with the multidimensional market
models is that only a privileged few
fully understand them. At a certain
complexity level, these models are
simply useless to senior management. That is why we are unlikely to
see the death of CAPM or the efficient market hypothesis yet. The
passionate critiques of CAPM and
EMH notwithstanding, no one has
come up with a workable alternative. So instead of throwing out the
old financial models in favor of new
ones, senior managers are likely to
find it more helpful to use the new
concepts to understand the assumptions and limitations that are built
into the models they have been using all along. In the long run, then,
the new finance may turn out to be
mostly a new and improved version
of the old finance.
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HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW March-April 1993
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