Cost overruns in Large-Scale Transportation Infrastructure Projects: Explanations and Their Theoretical Embeddedness

TL;DR

This paper reviews various explanations for cost overruns in large-scale transportation projects, highlighting political explanations as most dominant and discussing relevant theories like agency and eclectic theory.

Contribution

It categorizes explanations for cost overruns into technical, economic, psychological, and political, emphasizing the prominence of political explanations and associated theories.

Findings

Political explanations are most dominant for cost overruns.

Agency theory is central to political explanations.

A range of theories explains nonpolitical causes.

Abstract

Managing large-scale transportation infrastructure projects is difficult due to frequent misinformation about the costs which results in large cost overruns that often threaten the overall project viability. This paper investigates the explanations for cost overruns that are given in the literature. Overall, four categories of explanations can be distinguished: technical, economic, psychological, and political. Political explanations have been seen to be the most dominant explanations for cost overruns. Agency theory is considered the most interesting for political explanations and an eclectic theory is also considered possible. Nonpolitical explanations are diverse in character, therefore a range of different theories (including rational choice theory and prospect theory), depending on the kind of explanation is considered more appropriate than one all-embracing theory.