Unconscious Bias in Infrastructure Project Finance Decisions

A modern and functioning infrastructure is the key to maintaining the competitiveness of economies. In many countries, however, there are serious gaps in the supply of infrastructure, not least due to public budget bottlenecks. Therefore, the importance of project financing of public infrastructure has strongly increased for theory and practice. Numerous failed projects show that the success of this financing structure depends above all on realistic risk assessment. For this, project risks need to be understood in their full complexity. This includes in particular the risk of investors and lenders to misperceive the uncertainty in the decision-making situation. Heuristics and cognitive bias can lead decision makers to under- and overvalue risks and rewards. The goal of this dissertation was thus to understand the use of unrealistic optimism among investors and lenders in infrastructure project finance to find ways to make the risk assessments more realistic, optimize spending, and contribute to closing the infrastructure finance gap. To achieve this a theoretical causal bias model of individual decision maker unrealistic optimism and a predictive model of company unrealistic optimism were developed and tested with a survey among 102 relevant decision stakeholders. A major finding is that unrealistic optimism influences risk assessment in the financing of European infrastructure projects. Company related factors, personal factors, and overconfidence influence this unrealistic optimism on individual level. Unrealistic optimism on company level is further influenced by the institutional structure and objective company characteristics. The findings of the dissertation result in significant theoretical and practical contributions by showing that unrealistic optimism is at least partly situational and not strictly rooted in the head of the decision maker no matter the circumstance. Companies can thus reduce unrealistic optimism of their employees by applying the right institutional structure and team setting.