Delusions of Success: Comment on Dan Lovallo and Daniel Kahneman
By Bent Flyvbjerg. 2003
128 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Dan Lovallo and Daniel Kahneman must be commended for their clear identification of causes and cures to the planning fallacy in, “Delusions of Success: How Optimism Undermines Executives’ Decisions” (July 2003). Their look at overoptimism, anchoring, competitor neglect, and the outside view in forecasting is highly useful to executives and forecasters. However, Lovallo and Kahneman underrate one source of bias in forecasting — the deliberate “cooking” of forecasts to get ventures started. My colleagues and I call this the Machiavelli factor.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management Science and Operations Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2aaee83650db4064bc56f3bc6fef0164ec1ceceb
How researchers see this paper
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In Economics and Econometrics
- Søren L. Buhl
- Mette K. Skamris holm
- A. Ansar
- Daniel Lunn
- Alexander Budzier
- Bent Flyvbjerg
- R. Vickerman
- D. Ahiaga-Dagbui
In Management Science and Operations Research
- Bent Flyvbjerg
- Mette K. Skamris holm
- Søren L. Buhl
- A. Ansar
- Daniel Lunn
- Alexander Budzier
- Bert van Wee
- Eric Molin
Citations in the corpus
- Policy and Planning for Large-Infrastructure Projects: Problems, Causes, Cures (2005, unknown): “For reasons of space, here we present only an outline of the method, based mainly on Lovallo and Kahneman (2003) and Flyvbjerg (2003).”
- Does Infrastructure Investment Lead to Economic Growth or Economic Fragility? Evidence from China (2016, unknown): “(2002, 2003) reasoned that if inaccurate cost estimates were a consequence of technical causes, errors in overestimating costs would have been of the same size and frequency as errors in underestimating costs.”
- How (In)accurate Are Demand Forecasts in Public Works Projects?: The Case of Transportation (2005, methodology): “For reasons of space, here we present only an outline of the method, based mainly on Lovallo and Kahneman (2003) and Flyvbjerg (2003). In a different context, we are currently developing what is, to our knowledge, the first instance of practical reference class forecasting in planning (UK Department”
- Should We Build More Large Dams? The Actual Costs of Hydropower Megaproject Development (2014, background): “…proposes two explanations— psychological delusion and political deception—that suggest decision-makers' forecasts, and hence ex ante judgment, are often adversely biased (Tversky and Kahneman, 1974; Kahneman and Lovallo, 1993; Flyvbjerg, 2003; Lovallo and Kahneman, 2003; Kahneman, 2011).”