Common biases in client involved decision-making in the AEC industry

Understanding of the constitution of client involved decisions is important for future improvements of the processes. Significant decisions in construction projects are reliant on heuristic processes where assumptions are developed from past experience. The paper presents a methodology to collect empirical data in an unstructured manner utilizing participant intuition and experience regarding project level collaboration, a term easily understood by practitioners. Empirical data collected from 6 focus group discussions in Norway and 18 individual interviews in Finland is associated with biases in decision making aimed at bridging the gap of understanding and literature’s insufficient coverage. An analytic framework was developed to suit the diverse emergence of concepts to allow application of psychological principles in a structured manner to empirical data. The paper contributes by identifying types of cognitive and motivational biases in client involved decisions. The biases are found to be alleviated by one another depending on the particular application of the decision. Findings suggest that normative beliefs exist developed from past experience and habitual thinking. A number of emerged biases in this domain are alleviated from normative beliefs which are discussed in this paper.