John Carter

After carefully studying this case, I was under the impression that John Carter relied heavily on his team members’, Paul Edwards and Tom Burns, limited expertise and insufficient information in deciding whether to enter the Pocono race since he was the only one in the team with no mechanical background. Although the incentives from winning the race, e.g. winning contracts and TV exposure, seemed very appealing while the statistical chance in winning the race within the top five was approximately 50%, John and his team failed to spot several major weaknesses and decision biases that might potentially flaw the team’s decision-making process including:

Confirmation Bias: Tom was looking to confirm his belief that there was no correlation between temperatures and gasket failures, so he presented a temperature and gasket relationship chart that only showed one side of the story confirming that gasket failures could occur in both cold and warm weather, discounting Paul’s belief that in the engine problem was related to cold temperature. Yet Tom and the team failed to seek additional disconfirming evidence in order to prove the point right. For example, what if there was less gasket problems in colder temperature? A chart showing relationship between temperature for races and number of races without gasket failures could potentially disprove his point.

Insufficient information #1: According to Tom’s relationship charts, the range of temperature were only from 45F to 85F, however, it was 40F in the morning of the race. We did not have any statistics that might indicate whether there were more gasket failures when the temperatures got below 45F, therefore we did not have sufficient data to soundly predict whether there might likely be gasket problems at these temperature level. It was almost impossible to make an educated guess, using the trends provided from the given information, e.g. Tom’s relationship charts

Insufficient information #2: Paul boasted to John that...