Investors must adopt profitable investment opportunities to maximize their wealth. Almost all investment, finance, engineering economics textbooks explain that net present value (NPV) measures the profitability (or value) of investment opportunities in absolute size, and internal rate of return (IRR) measures the profitability of investment opportunities in relative proportions. However, NPV is a measure of the relative size of the return on investment opportunity to do-nothing alternative. Moreover, IRR can occur in multiple investment opportunities and may not exist. To make matters worse, IRR and NPV also have conflicting problems in accept-or-reject decisions. In this study, the reason why NPV and IRR cannot accurately measure the profitability of investment opportunities is identified, and fundamental characteristics that investment opportunity profitability measures should have are presented.

The net present value (NPV) is generally used in accept-or-reject decisions in engineering projects. Although the internal rate of return (IRR) is a highly complex and arbitrary process, it can reach the same conclusion as the NPV criterion. However, neither the NPV nor the IRR indicates how much money should be invested and how much profit can be made from an investment during a project. In this study, based on the reasons why the NPV and IRR cannot correctly measure the profitability of an investment, the must-have profitability measurement characteristics of an engineering project are presented.

  The reinvestment assumption of the internal rate of return(IRR) method may not be valid in an engineering economy study. This situation, coupled with the computational demands and possible multiple interest rate associated with the IRR method, has given

In capital budgeting practices, investment project evaluations based on the net present value (NPV) and the internal rate of return (IRR) represent the traditional evaluation techniques. Compared with the traditional methods, the modified internal rate of return (MIRR) gives the opportunity to evaluate an investment in certain projet, while taking the changes in cash flows over time and issuing shares such as dividing shares, bonuses, and dividend for each end of the investment year into account. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate an investment in the Malaysian construction sector utilizing financial data for 39 public listed companies operating in the Malaysian construction sector over the period from Jan 1, 2007, to December 30, 2018, based on the MIRR method. Stochastic was studied in this study to estimate the estimated probability by applying the Markov chain model to the MIRR method where the transition matrix has two possible movements of either Good (G) or Bad (B). it is found that the long-run probability of getting a good investment is higher than the probability of getting a bad investment in the long-run, where were the probabilities of good and bad are 0.5119, 0.4881, respectively. Hence, investment in the Malaysian construction sector is recommended.