What is Investment Cost

Recognizing the inadequacy of traditional quantitative cost-benefits analysis for evaluating telecommunications investments, researchers suggest real options (ROs) for controlling and valuating telecommunications business activities. However, ROs are based on the concept to delay investment for collecting more information and learning more about business conditions and during this delay another competitor may act gaining significant competition advantage. In addition, RO models are strictly quantitative and very often telecommunications investments may contain qualitative factors, which cannot be quantified in monetary terms. In addition, ROs analysis results in some factors that can be treated more efficiently when taken qualitatively. This work deals with quantitative and qualitative analysis and integrates ROs and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) into a common decision analysis framework providing a multicriteria model, for analyzing telecommunication investments in the deregulated business field.