Fortune, C and Lees, M (2000) Strategic cost advice and the effect of cognitive error. In: Akintoye, A (ed.) Proceedings of 16th Annual ARCOM Conference, 6-8 September 2000, Glasgow, 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 groups of error that affects judgement is "cognitive error". This group includes sample size error, base rate error and logic error. This study identifies that construction professionals make systematic errors of judgement due to cognitive error. The paper reports the development of an appropriate measuring instrument and the results of its application to a group of thirty-six practitioners. Subjects were tested on their propensity to make errors in judgement via text 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 on other biases. The paper goes on to report the findings of a follow up study to determine the significance of these errors in practice. The paper concludes by setting out the case for the development of training a package to help practitioners to deal with the propensity to make errors.
| Item Type: | Conference Paper (Paper) |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | cognitive; early cost advice; error; judgement |
| Index terms: | practitioner, package, bias, measuring instrument, heuristic, project cost, exercise, sample size, construction professional |
| Subjects: | research design and methodology, economics, probability and distributions, analytical methods, risk assessment, professional development, practitioner, contractual arrangements, health behaviours and lifestyles |
| Topics: | Health and Safety, Information Management, Engineering Principles, Roles and Professions, Research Practice, Cost Management, Risk Management, Procurement |
| 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