Heuristics at Work: The Presence and Impact of Availability Bias in Construction Workforce Management Decision-Making
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Meng, Che-Ting Ting
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Abstract
Construction workforce management requires complex decision-making under constraints of time, resources, regulatory compliance, and—importantly—cognitive capacity. Despite the widespread implementation of decision-support frameworks, cognitive biases such as heuristics may compromise managerial judgment. This study explores the current literature gap and the implications of the availability heuristic in workforce-related decisions within the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry. The availability heuristic is a cognitive bias wherein individuals estimate event probabilities based on memory accessibility rather than statistical accuracy.
A controlled, survey-based experiment was conducted with 84 AEC professionals from across the United States. Participants were asked to allocate emergency workforce funds across five domains: (1) vocational training and education; (2) employee health and welfare benefits; (3) occupational safety and health (OHS); (4) on-site project management; and (5) equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI). Each domain was accompanied by tailored familiarity assessments and randomized information stimuli to evaluate susceptibility to the heuristic.
Statistical analysis methods—including conditional probability and lift, t-tests, and two-way ANOVA—confirmed that higher familiarity strongly correlated with increased favoritism likelihood, substantiating the presence of availability heuristics. The heuristic’s effects were consistent across topic areas and professional demographics (role, experience, and location), indicating its ubiquitous influence in the industry. However, the effectiveness of an intuitive randomized exposure-based mitigation strategy was inconclusive and varied by domain, revealing limitations in simple cognitive debiasing approaches.
The study’s findings highlight an overlooked vulnerability in AEC workforce management: cognitive biases may undermine rational decision-making despite professional expertise and structured frameworks. These insights underscore the necessity of incorporating behavioral economic principles into construction management processes to develop more resilient and bias-aware decision systems. This work serves as a foundational step in expanding behavioral research within infrastructure planning and project delivery contexts.
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2025-05-09
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