Opportunity costs at Olive Garden.

Olive Garden restaurants don't pay rent to the parent company, Darden.  This raises the question as to whether the true opportunity cost of the real estate that the restaurants sit on is being fulling realized.

http://www.vox.com/2014/9/18/6343665/starboard-olive-garden

The situation has has come to a head now that an activist investor has replaced the entire Board of Darden restaurants in order to effect a change.  

This is a great example of corporate governance and capital budgeting interacting.

Prediction:  Fewer Olive Garden restaurants.

Doing nothing is an option

Real options are common in business - they represent the value of being able to choose to do something in the future.  An example of a real option is the option to expand production of a product if initial sales look good.

But real options can also include the option to not do something, as in the case of not drilling for oil when it might be more profitable to wait.  Unfortunately, the Federal Government doesn't understand real options and Felix has the story.

Google's bandwidth bill is probably not zero.

Here's a good question for finance students. Based on this article, is Google's bandwidth bill for youtube really zero?

The article argues that Google has soooo much fiber optic cable that it basically trades bandwidth with other ISPs and never pays for bandwidth. So if you're doing a cash flow analysis on youtube would assume that band width cost was really zero?

For a bonus, use the words "opportunity cost" and "sunk cost" correctly in your answer.