The Lease-or-Buy and Asset Acquisition Decisions

A SIGNIFICANT PORTION of business finance theory is concerned with firm investment criteria derived under the assumption that the firm objective is to maximize shareholder wealth. It is therefore somewhat surprising that no leaseor-buy criterion is available which has been shown to be consistent with this objective. In Section I of the present paper, a decision rule is derived which indicates whether an asset should be acquired and whether acquisition, if justified, should be by purchase or lease. In Section II, existing proposals, including those of Vancil [21] and Johnson and Lewellen [4], are briefly considered and found to be inconsistent with the shareholder wealth maximizing criterion. Section III is a summary.