Facebook's volatile IPO was the result of disparate opinions about how to value the social network's 900 million users, according to a recent report by the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania.
"The question for valuation is you need to have both some sort of comparable and some sense of where the numbers are going, and the problem is neither of those are really clear in the case of Facebook," said Ethan Mollick, Wharton Assistant Professor of Management, on CNBC's Squawk on the Street. "Is it a TV network in comparison? Is it Google? Is it something entirely new? And on the underlying numbers it's all about potential. We don't know where the numbers are heading. There's a lot of debate over that. If it's just about pricing the stock where it is today, the value is obviously a lot lower than $100 billion."