Related papers: Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition

This paper argues, first, that a major problem in the planning of large infrastructure projects is the high level of misinformation about costs and benefits that decision makers face in deciding whether to build, and the high risks such…

The article first describes characteristics of major infrastructure projects. Second, it documents a much neglected topic in economics: that ex ante estimates of costs and benefits are often very different from actual ex post costs and…

This paper takes stock of megaproject management, an emerging and hugely costly field of study. First, it answers the question of how large megaprojects are by measuring them in the units mega, giga, and tera, concluding we are presently…

This report reviews the Edinburgh tram project's risk management. Projects frequently overrun their cost and timelines and fall short on intended benefits. Cost, schedule, and benefit risk of projects need to be carefully considered to…

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…

This article presents results from the first statistically significant study of cost escalation in transportation infrastructure projects. Based on a sample of 258 transportation infrastructure projects worth US$90 billion and representing…

A major source of risk in project management is inaccurate forecasts of project costs, demand, and other impacts. The paper presents a promising new approach to mitigating such risk, based on theories of decision making under uncertainty…

Some risks have extremely high stakes. For example, a worldwide pandemic or asteroid impact could potentially kill more than a billion people. Comfortingly, scientific calculations often put very low probabilities on the occurrence of such…

Academic research projects receive hundreds of billions of dollars of government investment each year. They complement business research projects by focusing on the generation of new foundational knowledge and addressing societal…

A brisk building boom of hydropower mega-dams is underway from China to Brazil. Whether benefits of new dams will outweigh costs remains unresolved despite contentious debates. We investigate this question with the "outside view" or…

The Economist recently reported that infrastructure spending is the largest it is ever been as a share of world GDP. With $22 trillion in projected investments over the next ten years in emerging economies alone, the magazine calls it the…

Scientific research requires taking risks, as the most cautious approaches are unlikely to lead to the most rapid progress. Yet much funded scientific research plays it safe and funding agencies bemoan the difficulty of attracting…

Risk, including economic risk, is increasingly a concern for public policy and management. The possibility of dealing effectively with risk is hampered, however, by lack of a sound empirical basis for risk assessment and management. The…

This article presents results from the first statistically significant study of causes of cost escalation in transport infrastructure projects. The study is based on a sample of 258 rail, bridge, tunnel and road projects worth US$90…

Forecasting has always been at the forefront of decision making and planning. The uncertainty that surrounds the future is both exciting and challenging, with individuals and organisations seeking to minimise risks and maximise utilities.…

The estimation of risk measures recently gained a lot of attention, partly because of the backtesting issues of expected shortfall related to elicitability. In this work we shed a new and fundamental light on optimal estimation procedures…

Empirical science needs to be based on facts and claims that can be reproduced. This calls for replicating the studies that proclaim the claims, but practice in most fields still fails to implement this idea. When such studies emerged in…

In the first section, this report analyses Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs) in the context of megaprojects, explaining why they are often delivered over budget and late. In the second section, the report discusses how Small Modular Reactors…

Preprocessing forms an oft-neglected foundation for a wide range of statistical and scientific analyses. However, it is rife with subtleties and pitfalls. Decisions made in preprocessing constrain all later analyses and are typically…

This report was originally written as an industry white paper on Hedge Funds. This paper gives an overview to Hedge Funds, with a focus on risk management issues. We define and explain the general characteristics of Hedge Funds, their main…