DIVERSIFICATION AS REAL OPTIONS AND THE IMPLICATIONS ON FIRM-SPECIFIC RISK AND PERFORMANCE

摘要

The management literature posits that firms can create value through diversification. In contrast, the established finance literature concludes that diversified firms destroy value. This paper suggests a way to reconcile these two warring camps by articulating a new theory of the way in which diversification can add value not by increasing performance, but by reducing risk in ways that investors cannot replicate. Specifically, diversification, understood dynamically, provides a way for companies competing in especially turbulent industries to hedge the competitive risk attendant to "convergence" phenomena. That is, in industries where the optimal operating scope of a firm is in question because the promise of convergence cannot be exploited using market-mediating mechanisms, firms will "over diversify" as a hedge against uncertain future reconfigurations of industry boundaries. In other words, these firms diversify as a way to create "real options" on future integration. These options create a form of "strategy insurance" that investors can not recreate with a portfolio of focused firms: investments in two separate, focused firms do not create an option on a single firm that encompasses the activities of those two companies. As uncertainty spawned of convergence begins to fade, strategically-hedged firms will re-focus their operations by exercising or abandoning their options on integration in a manner appropriate to the demands of their newly-defined marketplaces. Option-creating diversification has potentially profound implications on operating performance and risk profile. Most significantly, options-based diversification is asserted to cause the operating performance of such firms to fall as they diversify and increase as they focus, in keeping with the observations of the finance literature. Yet the firms will have created value for shareholders by compensating for significant strategic risks that investors cannot otherwise hedge.