EAGER: Foundations for Combining Normative and Behavioral Research Methodologies to Study Systems Engineering

这个早期探索性研究奖助金项目的研究目标是证明使用网络支持的严肃游戏来进行受控实验的可行性，以回答系统工程项目中有关决策的问题。严肃的游戏是一种用于娱乐以外的目的的游戏，例如用于培训飞行员的飞行模拟器。这项研究将利用行为科学的成熟技术来确定游戏干预中的受试者的平均行为是否与那些给予传统文本调查的受试者相同。调查将侧重于卫星工程项目背景下的沉没成本现象，作为研究方案。沉没成本现象在行为科学界得到了广泛的研究，为本研究提供了坚实的参照系。将创建一个基于游戏的实验的网络使能框架来支持这项研究。如果成功，这项研究将对系统工程研究产生重大影响。对系统工程方法的研究的必要性是显而易见的：许多最大的系统工程项目都会导致重大的延误、成本超支，而且往往无法达到规定的性能目标。然而，到目前为止，系统工程研究界缺乏用于评估所提出方法的对照实验的框架。这限制了研究进展，阻碍了新方法的采用。本研究中研究的基于博弈的方法可以起到这一作用。本研究也将为工程决策中沉没成本效应的研究提供新的证据。以前对沉没成本的研究并没有集中在工程师或工程决策上，因此这些新数据可以为一个潜在困扰工程项目的问题提供重要的洞察。

The research objective of this EArly-Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) project is to demonstrate the feasibility of using web-enabled serious games to conduct controlled experiments for answering questions about decision making in systems engineering projects. A serious game is a game used for purposes other than entertainment, such as a flight simulator for training pilots. The research will leverage established techniques from the behavioral sciences to determine whether subjects in the gaming intervention behave, on average, the same as those given a traditional text-based survey. The investigation will focus on the sunk cost phenomenon in the context of a satellite engineering project as a study scenario. The sunk cost phenomenon has been widely studied in the behavioral sciences community, so it provides a solid frame of reference for this investigation. A web-enabled framework for game-based experimentation will be created to support this research. If successful, this research will have a significant impact on systems engineering research. The need for research on systems engineering methods is apparent: many of the largest systems engineering projects incur significant delays, cost overruns, and often fail to meet stated performance objectives. However, to date the systems engineering research community lacks a framework for controlled experimentation for evaluating proposed methods. This limits research progress and impedes new method adoption. The game-based approach investigated in this research can serve this role. This research also will contribute new evidence about the sunk cost effect in engineering decision making. Prior studies of sunk cost have not focused on engineers or engineering decisions, so this new data can provide important insight into one problem that potentially plagues engineering projects.