The Flaw of Averages

Savage, S. L. (2009). The Flaw of Averages: Why We Underestimate Risk in the Face of Uncertainty. Wiley.

Type

Book

Intellectual base

Textbook

Year

2009

Link

https://uat.store.wiley.com/en-us/the-flaw-of-averages-why-we-underestimate-risk-in-the-face-of-uncertainty-p-9781118373583

Cited by

3 citations across 3 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Mechanisms

• Adaptive Staffing Model
  • Its central failure mode is staffing to the average: a model tuned to mean demand is systematically wrong whenever demand is variable, over-covering the typical hour and collapsing on the atypical one — the flaw of averages in operational form.

    This sourceExplains why decisions built on average assumptions fail under variability—the flaw of averages.

• Portfolio Review Cascade
  • The sharpest technical trap is the aggregate that hides its own variance — the flaw of averages, where planning to the mean of an uncertain portfolio systematically misleads.

    This sourceDefines the flaw of averages as the planning error produced by replacing uncertain variation with average assumptions.

• Simultaneous Feasibility and Capacity Test
  • Averaged over a month, almost any two roles look feasible, so a test run on typical load will happily clear an impossible pairing — the flaw of averages

    This sourceIdentifies the flaw of averages as the failure of plans built on average assumptions.

Verification

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Links previously used in the corpus

Before the registry existed this work was also linked 2 other ways.

• https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Flaw_of_Averages.html?id=2lsLAQi0LlcC ×1
• https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-flaw-of/9780470488126/ ×1

Registry ID ref:b2e3827dab96 · see in the full table