The Flaw of Averages

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

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

6 citations across 6 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.

• Belief Distribution Dashboard
  • Averaging across a bimodal population produces a center of mass where nobody actually sits — a live instance of the flaw of averages

    This sourceAn average can describe a scenario no member occupies and can conceal a consequential split in the underlying distribution.

• Per-Unit Service Standard
  • This is 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.

• Uncertainty Propagation Model
  • Treating coupled inputs as independent, or a curved response as a straight line, is precisely how a model produces a tidy output distribution that is wrong in the direction that hurts — an error the "flaw of averages" names: the output of a nonlinear model at the average input is not the average output.

    This sourceExplains the flaw of averages: a nonlinear model evaluated at average inputs need not produce the average outcome.

Verification

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Links previously used in the corpus

Before the registry existed this work was also linked 4 other ways.

• https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Flaw+of+Averages%3A+Why+We+Underestimate+Risk+in+the+Face+of+Uncertainty-p-9781118373583 ×2
• https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Flaw_of_Averages.html?id=2lsLAQi0LlcC ×1
• https://search.worldcat.org/title/316836135 ×1
• https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-flaw-of/9780470488126/ ×1

Registry ID ref:b2e3827dab96 · see in the full table