Re-Evaluating Megaproject Cost Overruns: Putting Changes Into Perspective

Putting ALLHAT into Perspective

Antihypertensive and Lipid-Lowering Treatment to Prevent Heart Attack Trial (the ALLHAT study), reported in late 2002,1 drew the interest of media journalists as well as the attention of the medical community and the health care industry. The nation’s leading newspapers and television networks scrambled to provide coverage of the significant findings. Although the abbreviated versions that made...

Putting medical risks into perspective.

Putting co-sleeping into perspective.

Co-sleepingbegins in infancy andoften continues through to childhood as part of early nurturing practices. In evolutionary terms the human infant is the most neurologically immature primate at birth and develops the most slowly, thus intense and prolonged mother-infant contact acts as a protectivemechanismagainst physiological difficulties and environmental assaults. Proposed benefits of close ...

Equilibrium Cost Overruns

Cost overruns are endemic in military procurement projects and pervasive in other areas. This paper studies a model in which the apparent cost overruns arise not as systematic expectational errors but as equilibrium phenomena. The possibility of renegotiating payments when cost overruns occur results in firms bidding below their true estimate of expected project costs. This can cause the initia...

Putting orang-utan population trends into perspective

Is it true that “the orang-utan could be virtually extinct within five years”, as reported by [1] in a recent issue of Current Biology? The dire conservation status of this ape warrants a sense of urgency [2], but we would like to present a more balanced view and highlight the emergence of some positive trends. Illegal logging, forest conversion and associated fires occur in most Indonesian nat...