Survivorship Bias
Survivorship bias is the focus on survivors instead of a broader context that includes those that did not survive. It appears in many arenas: athletics, business, entertainment. For every success, there are others who did not succeed. To properly judge success we must also view failure. Lacking this broader context, we make less-informed decisions.
Technique Overview
Survivorship Bias Definition
Survivorship bias, also known as survival bias, is a form of bias in selection of information. This is created by focusing on people, things or data that successfully passed a selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of their lack of visibility to those analysing the information. Survivorship bias can lead to overly optimistic beliefs because failures are ignored, such as when companies that no longer exist are excluded from analyses of financial performance (Shermer, 2014).
Survivorship Bias Description *
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Business Evidence
Strengths, weaknesses and examples of Survivorship Bias *
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Business Application
Implementation, success factors and measures of Survivorship Bias *
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Professional Tools
Survivorship Bias videos and downloads *
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Further Reading
Survivorship Bias web and print resources *
Survivorship Bias references (4 of up to 20) *
- Aldrich, H. E., & Wiedenmayer, G. (1993). From traits to rates: an ecological perspective on organizational foundings. In J. A. Katz & R. H. Brockhaus (Eds.), Advances in entrepreneurship, firm emergence, and growth (pp. 145–195). Greenwich: JAI
- Choo, C. W. (2001). Environmental scanning as information seeking and organizational learning. (Information Research) 7(1). http://InformationR.net/ir/7-1/paper112.html
- Coltman, T., Devinney, T., Latukefu, A., & Midgley, D. (2001). E-business: revolution, evolution, or hype. California Management Review, 44(1), 57–86
- Davenport, T. H. (2013) Analytics 3.0, Harvard Business Review, December.
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