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Record W4416527746 · doi:10.1017/9781009322737.003

The Rise and Fall of the Planning Fallacy

2025· book-chapter· W4416527746 on OpenAlexaff
Lavagnon A. Ika

Bibliographic record

VenueCambridge University Press eBooks · 2025
Typebook-chapter
Language
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicUrban Planning and Governance
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Ottawa
Fundersnot available
KeywordsFallacyArgument (complex analysis)AppealScope (computer science)Popularity

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The Planning Fallacy principle, a prominent account of project behavior and particularly the causes of cost overruns and benefit shortfalls, stems from the belief that bias outweighs error. Its very popularity begs for an inquiry on its theoretical appeal and whether it remains a viable argument to explain cost overrun and benefit shortfall behavior. This chapter argues that the Planning Fallacy is in danger of danger of being debunked, suggesting that while its rise can be attributed to an impulsion to theorize, its subsequent fall may be due to a companion compulsion to theorize. The chapter focuses on three questions: Is the Planning Fallacy principle a theory anyway and, if yes, is the theory complete? Is the theory too narrow in scope or does it cater to complexity and uncertainty? Will it lose support from the scientific community? The chapter demonstrates that the fall may be due to the incomplete nature of the theory and its limited scope. The chapter contends that the popular appeal of the Planning Fallacy has vastly overstepped its ultimate viability and suggests that the Planning Fallacy principle is itself a form of Planning Fallacy as it overestimates its own theoretical power.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.005
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.009
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.007
Threshold uncertainty score0.051

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0050.009
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.002
Science and technology studies0.0030.027
Scholarly communication0.0060.009
Open science0.0010.003
Research integrity0.0020.008
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.021
GPT teacher head0.220
Teacher spread0.199 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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