How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration

by Professor Bent Flyvbjerg

I started with an obscure phrase found within a paper that Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky published in 1979—not the famous 1979 paper on “prospect theory” that won Kahneman the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002 but another paper the prolific duo published the same year. The phrase is “reference class.”8