Debiasing budget judgment: experimental evidence from politicians and civil servants

Tom Overmans

Journal of Public Budgeting, Accounting & Financial Management, 2026, vol. 38, issue 3, 450-472

Abstract: PurposePublic budgeting requires judgment under uncertainty, yet evidence on whether debiasing interventions improve such judgment remains limited. Although research has documented bias effects in public decision-making, much less is known about whether simple debiasing interventions work in budgeting contexts and whether their effects depend on the type of judgment and the way interventions are embedded in decision contexts.Design/methodology/approachThe article reports a preregistered survey experiment among 1,230 politicians and civil servants. It compares three debiasing interventions (generic, realistic and innovative) across two judgment phenomena relevant to public budgeting: anchoring and loss framing. Treatment effects are analyzed quantitatively, supplemented by a descriptive analysis of written justifications in the loss-framing experiment.FindingsAnchoring effects are strong and persist across all conditions, with no intervention reducing their influence. In the loss-framing experiment, no overall framing effect is observed. Only the realistic intervention is associated with lower allocations relative to the loss-framed condition. Descriptive evidence suggests that interventions are associated with different patterns in how participants justify their decisions.Originality/valueThe article shows that debiasing effects in public budgeting are conditional rather than generalizable. More specifically, it demonstrates that effectiveness depends on how interventions are embedded in decision contexts, supporting an ecological perspective on budget judgment.

Keywords: Anchoring; Cognitive bias; Public budgeting; Debiasing; Loss framing; Vignette experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eme:jpbafm:jpbafm-04-2026-0160

DOI: 10.1108/JPBAFM-04-2026-0160

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