IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/ejores/v288y2021i2p666-681.html

Incentive schemes for resolving Parkinson’s Law in project management

Author

Listed:
  • Chen, Bo
  • Hall, Nicholas G.

Abstract

Project management is a business process that supports about 30% of the world’s economic activity. Yet projects routinely suffer from the influence of Parkinson’s Law. This behavioural phenomenon routinely results in failure to deliver work that is completed early before its assigned deadline. As a consequence, the late completion of other work is not offset, and overall project performance suffers. Hence, project success rates below 40% are widely reported.

Suggested Citation

  • Chen, Bo & Hall, Nicholas G., 2021. "Incentive schemes for resolving Parkinson’s Law in project management," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 288(2), pages 666-681.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:ejores:v:288:y:2021:i:2:p:666-681
    DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2020.06.006
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221720305476
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.ejor.2020.06.006?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Svenja C. Sommer & Cristoph H. Loch, 2009. "Incentive Contracts in Projects with Unforeseeable Uncertainty," Post-Print hal-00465165, HAL.
    2. Dharma Kwon, H. & Lippman, Steven A. & Tang, Christopher S., 2010. "Optimal time-based and cost-based coordinated project contracts with unobservable work rates," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 126(2), pages 247-254, August.
    3. Yaozhong Wu & Karthik Ramachandran & Vish Krishnan, 2014. "Managing Cost Salience and Procrastination in Projects: Compensation and Team Composition," Production and Operations Management, Production and Operations Management Society, vol. 23(8), pages 1299-1311, August.
    4. Myerson, Roger B, 1979. "Incentive Compatibility and the Bargaining Problem," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 47(1), pages 61-73, January.
    5. Genaro J. Gutierrez & Panagiotis Kouvelis, 1991. "Parkinson's Law and Its Implications for Project Management," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 37(8), pages 990-1001, August.
    6. Tony Chen & Ted Klastorin & Michael R. Wagner, 2015. "Incentive Contracts in Serial Stochastic Projects," Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, INFORMS, vol. 17(3), pages 290-301, July.
    7. Xuejun Hu & Nanfang Cui & Erik Demeulemeester, 2015. "Effective expediting to improve project due date and cost performance through buffer management," International Journal of Production Research, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 53(5), pages 1460-1471, March.
    8. Alberini, Anna & Longo, Alberto & Tonin, Stefania & Trombetta, Francesco & Turvani, Margherita, 2005. "The role of liability, regulation and economic incentives in brownfield remediation and redevelopment: evidence from surveys of developers," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 35(4), pages 327-351, July.
    9. Myerson, Roger B., 1982. "Optimal coordination mechanisms in generalized principal-agent problems," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 10(1), pages 67-81, June.
    10. Richard J. Schonberger, 1981. "Why Projects Are “Always” Late: A Rationale Based on Manual Simulation of a PERT/CPM Network," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 11(5), pages 66-70, October.
    11. Martin Krakowski, 1974. "Pert and Parkinson's Law," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 5(1), pages 35-40, November.
    12. Myerson, Roger B, 1986. "Multistage Games with Communication," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 54(2), pages 323-358, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Sun, Ankang & Chen, Bo, 2025. "Randomized strategyproof mechanisms with best of both worlds fairness and efficiency," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 324(3), pages 941-952.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Marinov, Eduard, 2008. "Нобеловата Награда За Икономика За Икономика 2007: Теорията За Икономическите Механизми [The Nobel Price for Economics 2007: The Design of Economic Institutions]," MPRA Paper 60294, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    2. Wei-Cheng Chen & Yi-Cheng Kao & Yi-Hsuan Lin, 2024. "Efficient work-from-home allocation for pandemic mitigation," Review of Economic Design, Springer;Society for Economic Design, vol. 28(1), pages 45-67, February.
    3. Roger B. Myerson, 1988. "Mechanism Design," Discussion Papers 796, Northwestern University, Center for Mathematical Studies in Economics and Management Science.
    4. Morvarid Rahmani & Guillaume Roels & Uday S. Karmarkar, 2017. "Collaborative Work Dynamics in Projects with Co‐Production," Production and Operations Management, Production and Operations Management Society, vol. 26(4), pages 686-703, April.
    5. Zhihua Chen & Yanfei Lan & Ruiqing Zhao & Changjing Shang, 2019. "Deadline-based incentive contracts in project management with cost salience," Fuzzy Optimization and Decision Making, Springer, vol. 18(4), pages 451-473, December.
    6. Forges, Françoise & Koessler, Frédéric & Salamanca, Andrés, 2024. "Interacting mechanisms: A perspective on generalized principal–agent problems," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 114(C).
    7. Doepke, Matthias & Townsend, Robert M., 2006. "Dynamic mechanism design with hidden income and hidden actions," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 126(1), pages 235-285, January.
    8. Devine, Mel T. & Lynch, Muireann Á., 2017. "Inducing truthful revelation of generator reliability," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 64(C), pages 186-195.
    9. Arve, Malin & Zwart, Gijsbert, 2023. "Optimal procurement and investment in new technologies under uncertainty," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 147(C).
    10. Lau, Stephanie, 2011. "Investment incentives in bilateral trading," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 73(2), pages 538-552.
    11. Wendi Tian & Erik Demeulemeester, 2014. "Railway scheduling reduces the expected project makespan over roadrunner scheduling in a multi-mode project scheduling environment," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 213(1), pages 271-291, February.
    12. Meirowitz, Adam, 2005. "Deliberative Democracy or Market Democracy: Designing Institutions to Aggregate Preferences and Information," Papers 03-28-2005, Princeton University, Research Program in Political Economy.
    13. Bester, Helmut & Ouyang, Yaofu, 2018. "Optimal procurement of a credence good under limited liability," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 61(C), pages 96-129.
    14. Chirantan Ganguly & Indrajit Ray, 2023. "Simple Mediation in a Cheap-Talk Game," Games, MDPI, vol. 14(3), pages 1-14, June.
    15. Amin H. Amershi & Peter Cheng, 1990. "Intrafirm resource allocation: The economics of transfer pricing and cost allocations in accounting," Contemporary Accounting Research, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 7(1), pages 61-99, September.
    16. Hagenbach, Jeanne & Koessler, Frédéric, 2020. "Cheap talk with coarse understanding," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 124(C), pages 105-121.
    17. Bester, Helmut & Krähmer, Daniel, 2012. "Exit options in incomplete contracts with asymmetric information," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 147(5), pages 1947-1968.
    18. Bester, Helmut & Strausz, Roland, 2007. "Contracting with imperfect commitment and noisy communication," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 136(1), pages 236-259, September.
    19. Grigory Pishchulov & Knut Richter & Sougand Golesorkhi, 2023. "Supply chain coordination under asymmetric information and partial vertical integration," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 329(1), pages 1315-1356, October.
    20. Soham R. Phade & Venkat Anantharam, 2021. "Mechanism Design for Cumulative Prospect Theoretic Agents: A General Framework and the Revelation Principle," Papers 2101.08722, arXiv.org.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:ejores:v:288:y:2021:i:2:p:666-681. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/eor .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.