Managerial Mental Accounting and Downstream Project Decisions
研究了项目经理在项目执行中因心理账户（损失厌恶、参照点更新、窄框架）导致范围与成本调整不足、降低利润的现象，并发现用计划进度衡量进展可缓解此问题，而用挣值衡量成本则不可取。
Project leaders are responsible for planning, controlling, and revising projects. As a project unfolds, the leader evaluates the project’s progress by comparing ongoing costs and scope to a baseline plan and considers potential revisions. We offer a general model of managerial mental accounting, which includes loss aversion, reference point updating, and narrow framing, and examine how it impacts downstream decisions. Our model predicts insufficient adjustments of project scope and cost at revision, resulting in reduced financial profit. We show that the choice of measure to quantify the project progress—planned, actual, or earned—affects the updating of reference points, and hence the downstream decisions. Thus, progress measures could be wisely employed to mitigate insufficient adjustments. It turns out that measuring progress via planned scope is often advantageous, whereas utilizing earned value for cost is never advisable. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.02929 .