Utility Theory, Value Maximization and the Quality Decision under Uncertainty
比较了竞争性企业在不确定性下使用期望效用模型和资本资产定价模型进行质量决策的差异，发现风险对政策的影响类似于风险厌恶增加，但两种框架的比较静态结果不同。
This paper analyzes the quality decision of the competitive firm under uncertainty using two well-known valuation frameworks: the expected utility model and the Capital Asset Pricing Model CAPM (see Sharpe [1964], Lintner [1965] and Mossin [1966]). The former approach is in some ways more general because it imposes few restrictions on the form of the preference function. However, the paradigm is limited because it implicitly assumes that the firm's decisions are independent of the financial market equilibrium (see Greenberg, Marshall and Yawitz [1978] and Brick and Jagpal [1980]). That is, the firm makes policy decisions regardless of their impact on market value and hence on the future wealth (utility) of the owner(s) (see Fama [1980]). This difficulty is dealt with in the CAPM by introducing additional assumptions about the behavior of investors and the distribution of returns from risky assets2. The main conclusions of our analysis are twofold. Firstly, for the competitive firm, the introduction of risk affects policy in the same manner as an increase in risk-aversion regardless of the valuation framework. As a special case, Sandmo's conclusion that the competitive firm unambiguously reduces output in the presence of uncertainty is true for the expected utility model only when uncertainty is exogenous. Secondly, the comparative statics properties of the model for general parameter shifts are different for the expected utility and CAPM frameworks. Specifically, the CAPM results have a clear economic interpretation regardless of the type of uncertainty. In contrast, the expected utility results are well-defined only if uncertainty is exogenous.