The Evolutionary Optimization of a Company’s Return on Equity Factor: Towards the Agent-Based Bio-Inspired System Supporting Corporate Finance Decisions

Return on Equity (ROE) is an important factor from the perspective of formulating and implementing a company's financial strategies. It is also one of its evaluation criteria. It presents to investors the effectiveness of using their capital. Increasing profitability may be treated as a symptom of shareholder wealth, while its reduction may be a signal indicating a deterioration of the financial situation of the company. An investment in a company will be attractive to investors if the results obtained by it will enable the benefit from the dividend to be paid and if the share prices will show an upward trend. Therefore, profit and profitability are categories dependent on the company and affect the wealth of its owners. The ROE ratio is synthetic and is linked to, among others with the size of sales, asset use activity, and the size of the company's debt. However, the decisions regarding the capital structure of a company should be made not only by purely economic and financial analyses but also should take into account the social and environmental effects of economic activities. To take into account not only short-term financial goals but also long-term sustainable development goals during the decision-making process, we need intelligent and creative multi-criteria decision support tools. Bio-inspired artificial intelligence techniques-such as evolutionary algorithms, deep neural networks, or swarm algorithms, to give only a few examples-are gaining more and more popularity in the recent years. Evolutionary algorithms are optimization techniques that are modeled on the processes of evolution that are taking place in natural populations. They can find approximate solutions to the NP-hard global, multi-modal, and multi-objective optimization problems. In this paper, we propose an innovative approach-an agent-based bio-inspired system supporting decisions in the area of corporate finance, which takes into account not only financial goals but also the sustainable development goals. The system will allow for multi-objective optimization with the use of bio-inspired algorithms. In this paper, we will concentrate on one module of the proposed system-the evolutionary algorithm optimizing the ROE factor. During the experiments, we will verify the ability of the proposed algorithm to provide decision makers with reasonable, useful, and, at the same time, also innovative and non-obvious solutions concerning the desired capital structure of a given company, which usually operates in a rapidly changing environment. The proposed system will allow for taking into account more than one criteria and perform multi-objective optimization with the use of an evolutionary algorithm or an agent-based co-evolutionary algorithm, soit will be possible to include also the long-term goals of sustainable development in the future.