Abstract This paper provides a tabular and descriptive comparison of the usage of various capital budgeting techniques over several time periods and surveys. Responses to a new questionnaire are found to be generally consistent with prior study results. The usage of sophisticated capital budgeting techniques continues to expand, but a wide variety of methods and approaches are used. There are substantial variations in the project evaluation techniques used for different categories of capital expenditures. The use of formal risk analysis techniques also appears to be expanding. A discriminant analysis found that the usage of these techniques is related to selected firm size and performance measures: total assets, capital expenditures, income before extraordinary items/total assets, and operating cash flows/total assets.
Klammer et al. (1991) studied this question.