This book was written as his dissertation paper during his Ph.D at Harvard. Williams sent The Theory of Investment Value for publication before he had won faculty approval for his doctorate. The work discusses Williams' general theory, as well as providing over 20 specific mathematical models; it also contains a second section devoted to case studies. Various publishers refused the work since it contained algebraic symbols, and Harvard University Press published The Theory of Investment Value in 1938, only after Williams had agreed to pay part of the printing cost.
Williams was among the first to challenge the "casino" view that economists held of financial markets and asset pricing—where prices are determined largely by expectations and counter-expectations of capital gains 6. He argued that financial markets are, instead, "markets", properly speaking, and that prices should therefore reflect an asset's intrinsic value.7 Developing this idea, Williams proposed that the value of an asset should be calculated using “evaluation by the rule of present worth”. Thus, for a common stock, the intrinsic, long-term worth is the present value of its future net cash flows—in the form of dividend distributions and selling price.