If Marriott used a single corporate hurdle rate for evaluating investment opportunities in each of its lines of business, what would happen to the company overtime?

If a company (Marriott in this case) uses a single hurdle rate to decide whether an investment should be undertaken or not, some projects that need to be accepted would end up being rejected and vice versa. For example,

if Marriott's hurdle rate is 10% and it's evaluating

project A with a 15% cost of capital &

project B with a 6% cost of capital.

Evaluation:

Project A would probably lead to a negative NPV because the cost of capital is higher (meaning it is riskier than the firm) hence could be rejected, but using the company hurdle rate of 10% to evaluate it could make its NPV positive. This would ignore the actual additional risk of the project.