"Investment in energy efficiency: do the characteristics of firms matter?" In their famous 1998 paper, DeCanio and Watkins raised the question and answered it affirmatively. Our paper addresses a parallel question: "Investment in energy efficiency: do the characteristics of investments matter?" To answer this question, we first describe our new investment decision-making model, applicable to all investment types. We then discuss our research results, based on questionnaires submitted to finance managers of 35 major electricity consumers in various commercial and industrial sectors. We show how characteristics other than profitability play an important role in investment choices. The investment category influences profitability evaluation, profitability requirement, and, ultimately, the decision made. For half of the firms in our study, energy-efficiency investments did not exist as a category. However, wide diversity regarding investment behavior is observed between firms. Our findings lead to a different explanation of the energyefficiency gap and open the way for a new approach to promoting energy-efficiency investments, which is briefly discussed in the conclusion.

Profitability is not the main driver of capital investment decision-making; financial evaluation tools often play a secondary role in corporate investment choices; businesses do not follow capital finance theory prescriptions, contrary to what mainstream claims; the strategic character of investments has a heavier decisional weight than profitability. These findings are based on a review of different streams of literature (mainly organizational finance and strategic decision-making) which is described in the second part of the paper, after a first part summarizing the main stances of mainstream energy economics and the main findings of the alternative literature on energy-efficiency investments. Yet, what is a strategic investment? To fill the existing conceptual gap, we propose a definition of strategic investment and a new theoretical framework to analyze investment projects. An example of applying this framework to an energy-efficiency project is described. The partial influence of financial factors and the importance of strategic factors in investment decisions entail several implications for energyefficiency practitioners, scholars, and public program developers, which are described in the last part of the paper.

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