An Investigation into Appraisal Bias: The Role of Decision Support Tools in Debiasing Valuation Judgments

Abstract

Given the nature of the valuation task environment appraisers are often made aware of previous value opinions rendered by appraisers, commonly in the form of an historic appraisal. And, because an appraisal task involves the rendering of market value, a hypothetical, unobservable construct based on probabilities, direct feedback against this objective is typically not possible. Alternate signals derived from the task environment such as confirmation of previous appraised values may be employed, thereby potentially altering the appraiser?s perception of the valuation objective leading to divergence from the normative model. The real estate behavioral literature suggests commercial appraisers have been susceptible to anonymous value opinions of experts, often times resulting in biased valuation judgments. This research is the first to focus on decision support tools as a technique to eliminate systematic biases in the appraisal process. The study focuses on the value opinion of an anonymous expert as a source of potential bias, because the value opinion of an anonymous expert is a common non-sanctioned source of influence representing a clear departure in the normative appraisal process. To operationalize the research hypotheses a two-factor randomized experiment to investigate the stated research hypotheses was conducted.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.