Managerial Involvement in Investment Decision: A Study of Hydropower Enterprises

This study extends the extant scope of understanding investment decision, beyond the dominant 'technical' emphasis on the application of discounted cash flow techniques. The research methodology draws the positivist and interpretive research paradigms. It uses a deductive approach, survey strategy and principal component analysis for the analysis. Three key sets of factors emerged as important in the investment decision process in the hydropower sector. They are: group consensus (framing), influences on own judgment (heuristics), and application of knowledge & experience (intuition). The use of purposive and convenient sampling might have some unintended impact on the findings. Consequently, any generalizations of the findings to a wider population of organizations and managers need to be made with care. It is hoped that this paper will encourage other researchers to go beyond the analytic techniques of investment appraisal that have dominated investment decision research and seek to balance the emphasis by focusing on human involvement and behavioral aspects of investment decision.