He is a recognized authority on financial economics, corporate performance measurement, corporate valuation and incentive compensation and is a pioneer and leading advocate of the concept of shareholder value.

In the case of smaller vendors doing open-source work, their objectives may be less "immediate revenue growth" and more "developing a large and loyal community," which may be the basis of a corporate valuation at merger time.

Although this had initially depressed corporate valuations, the sudden appreciation of stored knowledge value, the instruments developed to rate it and new internationally agreed accounting standards for intellectual capital had quickly pushed corporate valuations and the markets back up.

This generated a new flurry of discussion about what "market cap" really means, so we felt it appropriate to re-publish our primer from earlier this year on the different ways to judge corporate valuation.

A primer on corporate valuation: What's the world's largest technology company?

Every time the market cap discussion comes up, people forget that Ars wrote an article on corporate valuation.

Advani is the founder and president of Telestrat Education, and education company that offers continuing legal education courses and financial training on topics ranging from corporate valuation to financial reporting.

Fundamentally based indexes are indices in which stocks are weighted by one of many economic fundamental factors, especially accounting figures which are commonly used when performing corporate valuation, or by a composite of several fundamental factors.

And while investors rushed to buy up stocks because the tax-free treatment of dividends is expected to increase corporate valuations, most economists remained skeptical that the plan would provide much of a jolt to either corporate investment or consumer spending.

Wong teaches corporate restructuring, financial engineering, Financial Road Maps, forward looking term sheet in corporate valuations.