Penalized present value


The Penalized Present Value is a method of capital budgeting under risk developed by Fernando Gómez-Bezares in the 1980s.
PPV is best understood by comparison to two other approaches where a penalty is applied for risk:
Contrasting to both, PPV calculates the average NPV at the risk-free rate, penalizing it afterwards by subtracting t standard deviations of the NPV :
The PPV has many versions, a particularly pragmatic one can be reached by assuming
we know the maximum or most optimistic NPV,
the minimum or most pessimistic one,
these NPVs are approximately normally distributed, and may be calculated via the risk-free rate.
Then, we can approximate: and .
Assuming a reasonable t of 1.5:
Therefore, given that we are risk-averse, we weight more the worst case than the most favorable one. Obviously other weights could be applied.
According to this criterion, the decision maker will look for investments with positive PPVs, and if a choice is needed, he or she will choose the investment with the highest PPV.

PIRR

A reasonable derivation of the PPV is the PIRR, which can be useful, among other things, to measure the performance of an investment fund or an investment portfolio. Assuming that μIRR and σIRR are, respectively, the mean and the standard deviation of the Internal Rate of Return, and following the reasoning above we will have:
Now calling r0 the risk-free rate, μ* the average return of the market portfolio and σ* its standard deviation, we can do:
which is the value of the Sharpe Ratio of the market portfolio. So we can do:
This would be the linear version of the well-known Sharpe Ratio.