Excerpt from Procedures for Capital Budgeting Under Uncertainty Accordingly, the cost of capital is defined as the minimum expected rate of return on a project (with given risk characteristics) such that share price is increased by the project's adoption. The cost of capital is thus used as a hurdle rate, with the height of the barrier depending on the risk characteristics of the project compared with those of alternative investments open to shareholders. It is easy to point out deficiencies in this "NPV approach" - for instance, most authors are conspicuously vague about how to measure the hurdle rates appropriate to projects with different risk characteristics. The important point for our purposes, however, is that the NPV approach presumes projects to be risk-independent. That is, it presumes that the value of project B does not depend on the risk characteristics of the firm's existing assets, or of other investments the firm may undertake. 2. Treat capital budgeting as a problem of portfolio selection. - The framework for portfolio selection originally presented by Markowitz [10] [11] is now well-known and widely accepted, although difficulties in assembling data and performing the required calculations have limited its use in practice. The similarity between the tasks of portfolio selection and capital budgeting has led Lintner, among others, to conclude that "the problem of determining the best capital budget of any given size is formally identical to the solution of a security portfolio analysis." About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.