Comprehensiveness in Capital Budgeting
批评了资本预算中过度简化、只用单一指标评估项目的做法，指出这会损失大量信息，建议使用多个指标在简洁与全面之间取得平衡。
* The financial analysis underlying capital budgeting is a process of concentrating information; uncoordinated basic data are collected, sifted, organized, and subjected to various quantitative techniques all to produce a final appraisal stressing the considerations most important to a financial manager responsible for selecting investment opportunities. Much current thinking favors concentration to the limit, as in Teichrow, Robichek, and Montalbano [11]: Since the decision problem under general conditions is extremely complicated, much of the literature is concerned with simplifying the problem by assigning to each project a single number which indicates a 'preference.' Here is a prescription for maximum simplicity achieved through maximum concentration; it is also a prescription for maximum loss of information, since concentration is achieved by ignoring (or at least playing down) complexities and sifting out all information thought to be of less than primary importance. At best, the reduction of a complex problem to a single number indicating preference will result in a minimax if the number selected entails less loss of information than all competing single numbers. An obvious means of reducing loss of information (cf. Durand [3, 4]) is to use two or more numbers to indicate preference striving for an economic trade-off between simplicity and comprehensiveness. Although defining and then finding an optimal trade-off is virtually unthinkable, the extreme position of reducing all complexities to a single number must be far from optimal. Indeed, an overall view of the literature indicates that the combined efforts of individuals seeking a single number have failed to produce one satisfactory to all users; instead, these efforts have produced a variety of numbers, and demonstrated their usefulness in specific applications if not in general. By now, any investment analyst with open ey s will see before him a virtual smorgasbord of analytical techniques and numbers indicating preference.