The Price of Everything and the Cost of Nothing: Evaluating London’s Underground Transport Infrastructure Projects 1900–2000
研究了20世纪伦敦地下交通项目评估中事后定价与事前折现框架的变迁，指出当前成本效益方法源于1960年代美国理念，并可能引发寻租问题，但实际成本和时间变化小于普遍认知。
This paper explores the historical development of management thought around the cost of public infrastructure. We argue that swings between ex post pricing and ex ante discounting as temporal frameworks within which the public, managers, politicians, and the media appraised major transport infrastructure projects constitute a dominant but unrecognized narrative. We use London in the twentieth century as a case study, identifying major changes in the 1920s and again in the 1960s which decisively rebalanced how projects were evaluated. We conclude that the current cost-benefit and ex ante discounting framework arose out of the adoption of American concepts and processes from the early 1960s onward. We think that this approach fostered rent-seeking activity and principal-agent problems, but that the empirical costs and timeframes for completing transport infrastructure have changed much less than is commonly believed in over a century.