Historically this phenomenon was proposed in In 1985 to describe the 'stage changes' of cancer patients by changing the criteria of stage-specific prognosis, even though there was no change in outcome of individual patients. Will Roger phenomenon finds much application in medical field. In oncology, sensitive tools allowed detection of cancer metastases much earlier, leading to categorization of more number of patients into more severe metastatic disease stage . Such a radical change in staging of the patient 's stage resulted in an improved prognosis of patients and higher 5 year survival in both the less and the more severe disease stages.
In terms of business and commercial aspect also it may be used in various aspects to improve the process efficiency in terms of running average. The best examples are:
- In industry to increase the productivity of two different shifts, morning and evening, the workers with moderate efficacy, lying in between the mean of the efficacy of two shifts may be shifted from one shift to another, thus both the batches have better yield.
- Reallocation of budget and resources from one to another potential project in a company, may result in better Return of Investent(ROI) for both the projects, by reducing the investment of the project with stronger expected output/yield. Whereas the weaker project, gets more funding and resources and get benefited tremendously by yielding much higher gain, though at the cost of mild to moderate increased investment.