The new CAP reform, abolishing the fair price policy, has created a new and riskier environment for farmers, especially as far as investment decisions are concerned. The traditional NPV Marshallian criteria of investment analysis is likely to be unfit, when farmers face irreversible or quasi-irreversible or delayable investments. In fact, in all such cases a valuable option of waiting arises. This delaying option when properly valued by the instrument of “real option analysis” can be so relevant to overturn the conclusions on the investment profitability reached by the traditional NPV analysis. Naturally this fact has profound implications as far as the definition of investment promoting policies are concerned. In this work, after summarizing the real option approach, we use it to shed some light upon the way uncertainty will effect the quasi-irreversible investment decision at farm level. We show that, differently from the traditional NPV criteria, the impact of investment subsidies turns out to be greatly diminished when the real option approach is correctly utilized instead.
