Cost overruns in transport infrastructure projects know no geographical limits, overruns are a global phenomenon. Nevertheless, the size of cost overruns varies with location. In the Netherlands, cost overruns appear to be smaller compared to the rest of the world. This paper tests whether Dutch projects perform signif…
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Empirical study finds IT project costs follow a power-law distribution, exposing risk underestimation.
This paper examines three independent explanatory variables and their relation with cost overrun in order to decide whether this is different for Dutch infrastructure projects compared to worldwide findings. The three independent variables are project type (road, rail, and fixed link projects), project size (measured i…
Using a methodology similar to that used the in the worldwide research, the cost performance of Dutch large-scale transport infrastructure projects is determined. In the Netherlands, cost overruns are as common as cost underruns but because cost overruns are larger than cost underruns projects on average have a cost ov…
This report was commissioned by the Commission of Inquiry Respecting the Muskrat Falls Project to provide the national and international context in which the Muskrat Falls Project took place. The Commission asked for the report to cover three specific topics of questions: (1) What is the national and international cont…
Lock-in, the escalating commitment of decision-makers to an ineffective course of action, has the potential to explain the large cost overruns in large scale transportation infrastructure projects. Lock-in can occur both at the decision-making level (before the decision to build) and at the project level (after the dec…
This study provides an independent, outside-in estimate of the cost and schedule risks of nuclear waste storage projects. Based on a reference class of 216 past, comparable projects, risk of cost overrun was found to be 202% or less, with 80% certainty, i.e., 20% risk of an overrun above 202%. Based on a reference clas…
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 categ…
Out-of-control information technology (IT) projects have ended the careers of top managers, such as EADS CEO Noel Forgeard and Levi Strauss' CIO David Bergen. Moreover, IT projects have brought down whole companies, like Kmart in the US and Auto Windscreen in the UK. Software and other IT is now such an integral part o…
Strategic behaviour is one of the main explanations for cost overruns. It can theoretically be supported by agency theory, in which strategic behaviour is the result of asymmetric information between the principal and agent. This paper gives a formal account of this relation by a signalling game. This is a game with in…
Olympic Games remain costly and overrun, despite reforms.
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 benefits. For large infrastructure projects the consequence is cost overruns, benefi…
Implementing large-scale information and communication technology (IT) projects carries large risks and easily might disrupt operations, waste taxpayers' money, and create negative publicity. Because of the high risks it is important that government leaders manage the attendant risks. We analysed a sample of 1,355 publ…
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 avoid this. The report describes and evaluates risk assessment and management for th…
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 billion. The focus is on the dependence of cost escalation on (1) length of project imp…
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 paper demonstrates the general point for cost and demand risks in urban rail projec…
Olympic Games consistently exceed budgets, leading to unpredictable costs.
Cost-benefit analysis often assumes accurate estimates, but this study finds significant inaccuracies.
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 "reference class forecasting" based on literature on decision-making under uncertainty …
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 different project types, geographical regions, and historical periods, it is fou…
A new method prioritizes project risks using Monte Carlo Simulation.
Projection-cost preservation is a low-rank approximation guarantee which ensures that the cost of any rank- projection can be preserved using a smaller sketch of the original data matrix. We present a general structural result outlining four sufficient conditions to achieve projection-cost preservation. These condit…
Field canals improvement projects (FCIPs) are one of the ambitious projects constructed to save fresh water. To finance this project, Conceptual cost models are important to accurately predict preliminary costs at the early stages of the project. The first step is to develop a conceptual cost model to identify key cost…
Paper proposes a method to estimate project cost contingency reserves considering various types of uncertainty.
Because of the prominent position of urban rail in reducing urban transport-related problems, such as congestion and air pollution, insights into the costs of possible new urban rail projects is very relevant for those involved with cost estimations, policy makers, cost-benefit analysts, and other target groups. Knowle…
This paper explores how theories of the planning fallacy and the outside view may be used to conduct quality control and due diligence in project management. First, a much-neglected issue in project management is identified, namely that the front-end estimates of costs and benefits--used in the business cases, cost-ben…
We introduce a general decision tree framework to value an option to invest/divest in a project, focusing on the model risk inherent in the assumptions made by standard real option valuation methods. We examine how real option values depend on the dynamics of project value and investment costs, the frequency of exercis…
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 which won the 2002 Nobel prize in economics. First, the paper documents inaccuracy…
A new slicing method reduces computational cost for cross-domain alignment.
Proposes a Carbon Equivalence Principle for financial products to align incentives and drive sustainability.
This paper focuses on projection-free methods for solving smooth Online Convex Optimization (OCO) problems. Existing projection-free methods either achieve suboptimal regret bounds or have high per-iteration computational costs. To fill this gap, two efficient projection-free online methods called ORGFW and MORGFW are …
Designs a neural network to reduce training cost by mapping to higher dimensions.
Research funding agencies routinely use a proportion of their total revenues to support internal administration and marketing costs. The ratio of administration to total costs, referred to as the administration ratio, is highly variable and within any single fund depends on many factors including the number and average…
Conditional gradients constitute a class of projection-free first-order algorithms for smooth convex optimization. As such, they are frequently used in solving smooth convex optimization problems over polytopes, for which the computational cost of orthogonal projections would be prohibitive. However, they do not enjoy …
The cost-benefit analysis formulates the holy trinity of objectives of project management - cost, schedule, and benefits. As our previous research has shown, ICT projects deviate from their initial cost estimate by more than 10% in 8 out of 10 cases. Academic research has argued that Optimism Bias and Black Swan Blindn…
Project fair estimators while maintaining accuracy.
Facing a heavy task, any single person can only make a limited contribution and team cooperation is needed. As one enjoys the benefit of the public goods, the potential benefits of the project are not always maximized and may be partly wasted. By incorporating individual ability and project benefit into the original pu…
Paper introduces a new project control method using Monte Carlo and statistical learning.
New method reduces total cost constraints in CBwK to sqrt(T) with fairness application.
A fast method for sparse PCA reduces computation time.
A new energy-efficient pruning method for federated learning.
This paper deals with supervised classification and feature selection in high dimensional space. A classical approach is to project data on a low dimensional space and classify by minimizing an appropriate quadratic cost. A strict control on sparsity is moreover obtained by adding an constraint, here on the ma…
A new indicator measures project risk from activity durations.
This paper extends Markovian projections to semimartingales with jumps.
We study the approximate nearest neighbour method for cost-sensitive classification on low-dimensional manifolds embedded within a high-dimensional feature space. We determine the minimax learning rates for distributions on a smooth manifold, in a cost-sensitive setting. This generalises a classic result of Audibert an…
New method reduces computational cost for nonnegative low rank matrix approximation.
A new metric HSW derived from hierarchical Radon Transform addresses computational bottlenecks in sliced Wasserstein.
Sepsis, a dysregulated immune system response to infection, is among the leading causes of morbidity, mortality, and cost overruns in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). Early prediction of sepsis can improve situational awareness amongst clinicians and facilitate timely, protective interventions. While the application of p…