Judgment and Decision Making in Project Continuation: A Study of Students as Surrogates for Experienced Managers

This work explores the efficacy of using students as surrogates for experienced managers in escalation studies. Participants were 222 managers with substantial project planning and evaluation experience and 146 undergraduate business students. Our results show that the experienced managers exhibited...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Abacus (Sydney) 2004-02, Vol.40 (1), p.94-116
Main Authors: Chang, C. Janie, Ho, Joanna L. Y.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accounting
Business accounting
Business studies
Decision making
Escalation studies
Finance
Funds allocation decisions
Management
Management accounting
Management decisions
Managers
Project continuation
Project evaluation
Project management
Students
Studies
Surrogacy
Surveys
Tertiary students
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Summary:This work explores the efficacy of using students as surrogates for experienced managers in escalation studies. Participants were 222 managers with substantial project planning and evaluation experience and 146 undergraduate business students. Our results show that the experienced managers exhibited a strong tendency to continue projects, with this tendency being positively related to the degree of project completion. The managers also tended to invest a greater amount of additional resources in response to favourable rather than to unfavourable information, contingent on the degree of project completion. In contrast, the students’ decisions showed little sensitivity to the contextual information, and they exhibited no association between the likelihood they would continue a project and how much funding they would allocate to the project. These results suggest that caution is needed in generalizing student‐based escalation findings to real‐world business settings.
ISSN:0001-3072
1467-6281
DOI:10.1111/j.1467-6281.2004.00145.x