Cost Overruns in Large-scale Transportation Infrastructure Projects: Explanations and Their Theoretical Embeddedness
By C. Cantarelli, Bent Flybjerg, Eric Molin, Bert van Wee. European Journal of Transport and Infrastructure Research, 2010
285 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Managing large-scale transportation infrastructure projects is difficult due to frequent misinformation about the costs which results in large cost overruns that often threaten the overall project viability. This paper investigates the explanations for cost overruns that are given in the literature. Overall, four categories of explanations can be distinguished: technical, economic, psychological, and political. Political explanations have been seen to be the most dominant explanations for cost overruns. Agency theory is considered the most interesting for political explanations and an eclectic theory is also considered possible. Non-political explanations are diverse in character, therefore a range of different theories (including rational choice theory and prospect theory), depending on the kind of explanation is considered more appropriate than one all-embracing theory.
Subfields: Finance, Management Science and Operations Research, Strategy and Management
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7a44dcf4cf4b4ed12562246b66f960573ecac47e
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In Finance
In Management Science and Operations Research
- Bent Flyvbjerg
- Bert van Wee
- T. Harland
- Adrijana Biba Starman
- Mario Pansera
- Bjarne Steffen
- R. Wood
- Vili Lehdonvirta
In Strategy and Management
Citations in the corpus
- Government quality and the economic returns of transport infrastructure investment in European regions (2015, unknown): “, motorways, high-speed rail), more appealing to incumbent politicians seeking re-election (Rodrı́guez-Pose, 2000; Cantarelli et al., 2010), at the expense of less flashy “ordinary” transport investments (i.”
- Top Ten Behavioral Biases in Project Management: An Overview (2021, methodology): “Economists use related terms like the “sunk-cost fallacy” (Arkes & Blumer, 1985) and “lock-in” (Cantarelli et al., 2010b) to describe similar phenomena.”