Fortune, C and Lees, M (1998) Quality in strategic cost advice: The effect of anchoring and adjustment. In: Hughes, W (ed.) Proceedings of 14th Annual ARCOM Conference, 9-11 September 1998, Reading, UK.
Abstract
The formulation of early stage building project cost advice for clients requires the professionals concerned to exercise judgement. The exercise of judgement is a human cognitive process that can be subject to errors, bias and heuristics. One of the biases that affects judgement is termed “anchoring and adjustment”. This study seeks to add to the literature related to judgement in early cost advice by ascertaining whether construction professionals are prone to make judgements that are biased by their reliance on the anchoring and adjustment heuristic. The paper reports the development of an appropriate measuring instrument and the results of its application to a group of thirty-four subjects. The subjects were a convenience sample drawn from a cohort of final stage part-time students in quantity surveying. Subjects were tested on their propensity to make biased judgements via word problems that were set in their own subject specific domain. The results of the work revealed that the subjects displayed the same level of error in response to the context based word problems as had been displayed in previous studies in which subjects responded to word problems set in non-work related contexts. The paper concludes by setting out the case for further empirical work in this area in order to address the impact of this and other biases on a wider sample of construction professionals.
| Item Type: | Conference Paper (Paper) |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | adjustment; anchoring; bias; error; judgement |
| Index terms: | surveying, measuring instrument, bias, heuristic, project cost, exercise, construction professional |
| Subjects: | health behaviours and lifestyles, professional development, risk assessment, analytical methods, health monitoring assessment and metrics, probability and distributions, economics |
| Topics: | Risk Management, Cost Management, Research Practice, Information Management, Engineering Principles, Health and Safety |
| Descriptive scope: | 3 PCA |
N.B. Descriptive scope is a count of how many of the five facets of empirical research are indicated by the words used in title, abstract and keywords. It is not intended as a judgement on the research; merely a count of the kind of word we would expect to indicate Phenomenon, Concepts, Theoretical framing, Empirical techniques, Analytical techniques. If all five are present, then a code of “5 PCTEA” will indicate this. If you feel the coding for this record is questionable, we welcome discussion around the terms we matched or the way we categorized them. The facet you would expect may not be coded, or a facet may be coded inappropriately. This can also bear on a larger question, of which facets should be treated as defining in construction management research. Please get in touch, and we will look at it. More details here