Modeling and debiasing resource saving judgments
Loading...
Files
Date
2014-09
Authors
Svenson, Ola
Gonzalez, Nichel
Eriksson, Gabriella
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Society for Judgment and Decision Making
Abstract
Svenson (2011) showed that choices of one of two alternative productivity increases to save production resources (e.g.,
man-months) were biased. Judgments of resource savings following a speed increase from a low production speed line
were underestimated and following an increase of a high production speed line overestimated. The objective formula for
computing savings includes differences between inverse speeds and this is intuitively very problematic for most people.
The purpose of the present studies was to explore ways of ameliorating or eliminating the bias. Study 1 was a control study
asking participants to increase the production speed of one production line to save the same amount of production resources
(man-months) as was saved by a speed increase in a reference line. The increases judged to match the reference alternatives
showed the same bias as in the earlier research on choices. In Study 2 the same task and problems were used as in Study 1,
but the participants were asked first to judge the resource saving of the reference alternative in a pair of alternatives before
they proceeded to the matching task. This weakened the average bias only slightly. In Study 3, the participants were asked
to judge the resources saved from each of two successive increases of the same single production line (other than those of
the matching task) before they continued to the matching problems. In this way a participant could realize that a second
production speed increase from a higher speed (e.g., from 40 to 60 items /man-month) gives less resource savings than the
same speed increase from a first lower speed (e.g., from 20 to 40 items/man-month. Following this, the judgments of the
same problems as in the other studies improved and the bias decreased significantly but it did not disappear. To be able to
make optimal decisions about productivity increases, people need information about the bias and/or reformulations of the
problems.
Description
14 pages
Keywords
Environment, Traffic, Biases, Heuristics, Resource savings, Time-saving bias, Efficiency, Debiasing
Citation
Svenson, O., Gonzalez, N., & Eriksson, G. (2014). Modeling and debiasing resource saving judgements. Judgment and Decision Making. 9, 465–478