Related papers: Regression to the Tail: Why the Olympics Blow Up
Given that Olympic Games held over the past decade each have cost USD 8.9 billion on average, the size and financial risks of the Games warrant study. The objectives of the Oxford Olympics study are to (1) establish the actual outturn costs…
The present paper is an update of the "Oxford Olympics Study 2016" (Flyvbjerg et al. 2016). We document that the Games remain costly and continue to have large cost overruns, to a degree that threatens their viability. The IOC is aware of…
Inspired by the Games held in ancient Greece, modern Olympics represent the world's largest pageant of athletic skill and competitive spirit. Performances of athletes at the Olympic Games mirror, since 1896, human potentialities in sports,…
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…
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…
We investigate the distributions of epsilon-drawdowns and epsilon-drawups of the most liquid futures financial contracts of the world at time scales of 30 seconds. The epsilon-drawdowns (resp. epsilon- drawups) generalise the notion of runs…
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 size that an epidemic can reach, measured in terms of the number of fatalities, is an extremely relevant quantity. It has been recently claimed [Cirillo & Taleb, Nature Physics 2020] that the size distribution of major epidemics in…
Do projects learn across space and time? The Olympics, among the largest publicly funded programmes in the world, offer a unique empirical setting. Theoretically, the Games seem ideal for generating "positive learning curves," driving down…
The Olympic Games are an important sporting event with notable consequences for the general economic landscape of the host city. Traditional economic assessments focus on the aggregated impact of the event on the national income, but fail…
Evaluating a country's sporting success provides insight into its decision-making and infrastructure for developing athletic talent. The Olympic Games serve as a global benchmark, yet conventional medal rankings can be unduly influenced by…
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…
Cirillo and Taleb [Nature Phys. 16, 606-613 (2020)] study the size of major epidemics in human history in terms of the number of fatalities. Using the figures from 72 epidemics, from the plague of Athens (429 BC) to the COVID-19…
Statistical distributions with heavy tails are ubiquitous in natural and social phenomena. Since the entries in heavy tail have disproportional significance, the knowledge of its exact shape is very important. Citations of scientific papers…
Climate extremes such as floods, storms, and heatwaves have caused severe economic and human losses across Europe in recent decades. To support the European Union's climate resilience efforts, we propose a statistical framework for…
This paper applies existing and new approaches to study trends in the performance of elite athletes over time. We study both track and field scores of men and women athletes on a yearly basis from 2001 to 2019, revealing several trends and…
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…
We study the optimal solution to a general two-slope ski rental problem with a tail risk, i.e., the chance of the competitive ratio exceeding a value $\gamma$ is bounded by $\delta$. This extends the recent study of tail bounds for ski…
The big jump principle explains the emergence of extreme events for physical quantities modelled by a sum of independent and identically distributed random variables which are heavy-tailed. Extreme events are large values of the sum and…
The classical ski-rental problem admits a textbook 2-competitive deterministic algorithm, and a simple randomized algorithm that is $\frac{e}{e-1}$-competitive in expectation. The randomized algorithm, while optimal in expectation, has a…