Do Engineers Trust Parametric Models Over Their Own Intuition?
Ricardo Valerdi, 29th Conference of the International Society of Parametric Analysts (ISPA), New Orleans, LA, June 12-15, 2007. This paper explores the abilities of engineers to estimate everyday tasks and their reliance on their own intuition when performing cost estimates. The approach to answering these questions is similar to that of the popular television show MythBusters which aims to separate truth from urban legend using controlled experiments. In MythBusters, methods for testing myths and urban legends are usually planned and executed in a manner to produce the most visually dramatic results possible, which generally involves explosions, fires, or vehicle crashes. While the question of parametric models versus intuition is not as exciting, we provide an interesting result that demonstrates the difference between what is real and what is fiction in the world of cost estimation. Two heuristics, representativeness and anchoring, are explored in two experiments involving psycholog
