preview

The Giant Pool of Money Case Analysis

Good Essays

The Issues The radio program draws an overall picture of the subprime mortgage crisis, how the subprime market was created, how the crisis happened, what were the result and its impact. (See appendix A - my summary of the case) The primary issues in this case are: why did the Wall Street bankers blindly trust that the risky mortgages were good assets to invest into? And why did everyone involved allow the whole thing to go this far? The Analysis The Wall Street bankers ignored the fact that the mortgages were risky is mainly due to the confirmation bias, specifically, the Anchoring Heuristic. Bazerman and Moore’s (2009) defines the Anchoring Heuristic as “Individuals make estimates for values based upon an initial value (derived …show more content…

(Blumberg & Davidson, 2008) A similar competitive irrationality happened within the larger banks. Mike Francis said, “I wish we had never done it. Unfortunately we did it because everybody else was doing it”. Tonko Gast also commented “We were a little early in '05 by not wanting to do those deals. And people were laughing at us”. Society reinforces people to appear consistent, and they don’t want to admit failure (Bazerman & Neale, 1992). Therefore no one of them stopped trading the falsified loans until they had to pay for the cost when the crisis came. Just like the 20 dollars auction paradigm, “a bidder may feel that one more bid may get the other person to quit. If both bidders feel this way, the result can be catastrophic.” (Bazerman & Neale, 1992). The Action From the analysis, the crisis arose from a series of biased or irrational individual and organizational behaviors. To avoid the catastrophic effect, each individual and organization must change their behaviors. In terms of the anchoring bias, regularly revisit of the original decision based on the newly gathered data needs to be set up within the organization. Additionally, the decision maker should avoid the Confirmation Trap in which Bazerman and Moore (2009) argues that people tend to seek information that confirms their expectations and hypotheses. To recognize the bias, Mike Francis could

Get Access