Quality in strategic cost advice: The effect of anchoring and adjustment

The formulation of early stage building project cost advice for clients requires the professionals concerned to exercise judgement. The exercise of judgement is a human cognitive process that can be subject to errors, bias and heuristics. One of the biases that affects judgement is termed “anchoring and adjustment”. This study seeks to add to the literature related to judgement in early cost advice by ascertaining whether construction professionals are prone to make judgements that are biased by their reliance on the anchoring and adjustment heuristic. The paper reports the development of an appropriate measuring instrument and the results of its application to a group of thirty-four subjects. The subjects were a convenience sample drawn from a cohort of final stage part-time students in quantity surveying. Subjects were tested on their propensity to make biased judgements via word problems that were set in their own subject specific domain. The results of the work revealed that the subjects displayed the same level of error in response to the context based word problems as had been displayed in previous studies in which subjects responded to word problems set in non-work related contexts. The paper concludes by setting out the case for further empirical work in this area in order to address the impact of this and other biases on a wider sample of construction professionals.