Talk:Net present value

Students are developing this article as part of an Eduzendium course.

I very much hope that in editing this article I have not harmed an eduzendium project. If I have, I apologise and I can only take comfort in the fact that all my changes can be reversed if necessary. However, I have run into the need for a link to an article on this subject in an article that I am trying to draft on Financial economics and for that purpose, I have introduced a slight extension to the maths to cover net present expected value.

I have transferred all of the maths onto the "Tutorials" subpage. That is in accordance with the policy that has been adopted for economics articles on the grounds that many educated layman are fazed by algebra, including those who can readily understand the same proposition phrased as verbal logic. I have introduced some rephrasing of the existing text, mainly for the same reason, but I have refrained from developing the subject further. I suggest that there is room for further development, for example in demonstrating the superiority of the NPV criterion over the discounted cash flow criterion, and in giving some numerical examples of NPEV calculations.

If it is decided to reverse my changes, I should be grateful for an opportunity to transfer some of the revised drafting to the tutorials subpage of the financial economics article before it is deleted from this article.

Nick Gardner 11:38, 25 February 2008 (CST)

• I think Eduzendium articles are supposed to say so if editing is not allowed, so your edits should be ok.
• If the consensus of the economics workgroup (especially economics editors) is to banish math to tutorials pages, that fact should presumably be documented on the workgroup homepage. (Aside: While I agree that the beginning of a page should be non-technical, banishing all equations to a subpage seems a bit extreme to me. The approval standards indicate that the target audience level is "average university student". The average university student knows math up through calculus, so a little algebra shouldn't be a problem.)

Warren Schudy 21:37, 25 February 2008 (CST)

Sad to say, some of the skills that I acquired as an undergraduate have faded with disuse over the years and seem now to be beyond recall. So I think it would be a pity to be over-exclusive in deciding which readers to serve. I mentioned the policy of putting graphs and maths on the tutorials subpages in a posting in the economics forum (under the heading "seeing ourselves as others see us") which attracted a number of favourable comments and no objections.  :Nick Gardner 01:57, 26 February 2008 (CST)

I think I read that [forum post] but I didn't realize it was proposing policy. IMHO if you want to claim something is policy of the workgroup you should:

• Make a clear proposal, perhaps using CZ:Proposals, and advertise it widely (forums, workgroup homepage, workgroup mailing list)
• If the policy is approved, document that on the workgroup homepage.

Warren Schudy 09:28, 26 February 2008 (CST)

A workgroup policy can be decided by the editors of the workgroup, preferably in combination with any authors working on the pages. I don't see a need to propose it as a general policy: what is more of a problem is that no other economics editors turn up to discuss policy. But that is not my fault. There may be some utility in putting the general workgroup policy somewhere on the workgroup page, but at this time there is so much there Idoubt that anyone would read it anyway.

Actually, I am more concerned by the yellow Eduzendium label at the top of this page! What is it supposed to mean, if anyone can write articles here??Martin Baldwin-Edwards 10:08, 26 February 2008 (CST)

I'm not an economics editor, but I think that banishing all graphs and equations to the "tutorial" pages is a bad idea. While some of the more complex derivations in economics can be usefully relegated to a subpage, the equations for compounded interest aren't too hard for an intelligent high school student armed with a calculator to handle. Anthony Argyriou 11:18, 26 February 2008 (CST)

Maths are the best way to simplify complex ideas. Formulas should not be banished from articles.--Sylvain Catherine 13:28, 27 February 2008 (CST)