Price and Valuation

This book is my doctoral dissertation. It has been published here because many people have the desire to read an old-fashioned book and enjoy turning the pages to digest the information at a comfortable rate. The original idea for this study, as many of my graduate students already know, came from a lecture by a previous graduate school professor of mine. His parable concerned a famous baseball coach who was really hungry after a baseball game and decided, because he was more hungry than usual, to slice the post-game pizza into eight slices instead of just four. If you understand why that is funny, then you have a good head start on the road to understanding the concept of true valuation. In the Field of Economics, concerning the long-term, price is the ultimate arbiter. When we couple price with non-traditional, relative valuation, whether it's pizza, a corporate entity for purchase for billions of dollars, or just the price of one share of stock, we get a better understanding of what something is actually worth. Therefore, we understand very quickly whether or not we are getting a "good deal" for the price paid. If you are not a rocket-scientist, but want a step-by-step and thorough understanding of what things are really worth - this book is for you.