Related papers: What You Should Know About Megaprojects, and Why: …
Back cover text: Megaprojects and Risk provides the first detailed examination of the phenomenon of megaprojects. It is a fascinating account of how the promoters of multibillion-dollar megaprojects systematically and self-servingly…
This paper asks and answers the question of whether Kahneman's planning fallacy or Hirschman's Hiding Hand best explain performance in capital investment projects. I agree with my critics that the Hiding Hand exists, i.e., sometimes benefit…
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…
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…
Megaprojects are large-scale, complex, and one-off engineering endeavors that require significant investments from a public or private sector. Such projects generally cost more than a billion dollars, take many years to develop and…
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…
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 Olympic Games are the largest, highest-profile, and most expensive megaevent hosted by cities and nations. Average sports-related costs of hosting are $12.0 billion. Non-sports-related costs are typically several times that. Every…
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…
If managers assume a normal or near-normal distribution of Information Technology (IT) project cost overruns, as is common, and cost overruns can be shown to follow a power-law distribution, managers may be unwittingly exposing their…
Despite several scientific achievements in the last years, there are still a lot of IT projects that fail. Researchers found that one out of five IT-projects run out of time, budget or value. Major reasons for this failure are unexpected…
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…
We identify and document a new principle of economic behavior: the principle of the Malevolent Hiding Hand. In a famous discussion, Albert Hirschman celebrated the Hiding Hand, which he saw as a benevolent mechanism by which unrealistically…
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…
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…
This article presents results from the first statistically significant study of traffic forecasts in transportation infrastructure projects. The sample used is the largest of its kind, covering 210 projects in 14 nations worth US$59…
Humankind is confronted with a "nuclear stewardship curse", facing the prospect of needing to manage nuclear products over long time scales in the face of the short-time scales of human polities. I propose a super Manhattan-type effort to…
This paper asks, "Do classics exist in megaproject management?" We identify three types of classic texts: conventional, Kuhnian, and citation classics. We find that the answer to our question depends on the definition of "classic" employed.…
Region of the country is treated as an open megasystem that consists of many interconnected complex network systems. Classification of such systems on the basis of ordered motion of flows is performed. The main approaches to investigation…
It is no secret that many projects fail, regardless of the business sector, software projects are notoriously disaster victims, not necessarily because of technological failure, but more often due to their uncertainties. The threats…