What happens to the value of the growth option if the variance of the project’s return is 14.2 percent? What if it is 50 percent? How might this explain the high valuations of many dot.com companies?

MINI CASE 

Assume that you have just been hired as a financial analyst by Tropical Sweets Inc., a mid-sized California company that specializes in creating exotic candies from tropical fruits such as mangoes, papayas, and dates. The firm's CEO, George Yamaguchi, recently returned from an industry corporate executive conference in San Francisco, and one of the sessions he attended was on real options. Since no one at Tropical Sweets is familiar with the basics of real options, Yamaguchi has asked you to prepare a brief report that the firm's executives could use to gain at least a cursory understanding of the topics. To begin, you gathered some outside materials the subject and used these materials to draft a list of pertinent questions that need to be answered. In fact, one possible approach to the paper is to use a question-and-answer format. Now that the questions have been drafted, you have to develop the answers.