In an interview with Project Magazine, Bent Flyvbjerg describes the challenges, causes, and cures of risk in major project management. Main challenges identified are benefit shortfalls, cost overruns, and schedule overruns. Root causes of risk are argued to be optimism bias and strategic...

Recently, as I was concluding a study on megaprojects, I was made to think of Nobel Price winner F.A. Hayek's controversial article "Why the Worst Get on Top," about the selection of political leaders. Like Hayek's political leaders, we found it is not necessarily the best megaprojects that...

It is useful to distinguish between “causes” and “root causes” in explaining cost overruns, benefit shortfalls, and delays in major projects. Conventionally, the following are listed as causes of project underperformance in the literature: project complexity, scope changes, technological...

A main problem in the decision-making of major infrastructure projects is the high level of misinformation about costs decision-makers face in deciding whether to build the project. Reduced public funds and misallocation thereof were the main reasons for the revival of private financing in...

In recent years the subject of decision making on large transport infrastructure projects and related institutional issues have received much attention in the academic and professional literature, partly triggered by the book Megaprojects and Risk (Flyvbjerg et al., 2003). This book shows that...

Results from the first statistically significant study of the causes of cost escalation in transport infrastructure projects are presented. 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)...