Sunk Costs - Features Characterizing The Sunk Cost Heuristic

Features Characterizing The Sunk Cost Heuristic

Two specific features characterizing the sunk cost heuristic worth mentioning are:

  1. An overly optimistic probability bias, whereby after an investment the evaluation of one's investment-reaping dividends is increased.
  2. The requisite of personal responsibility. Sunk cost appears to operate chiefly in those who feel personal responsibility for the investments that are to be viewed as sunk.

Read more about this topic:  Sunk Costs

Famous quotes containing the words features, sunk and/or cost:

    “It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times—the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie—seem attractive by comparison.”
    —Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)

    “Every disastrous accident alarms us, and sets us on enquiries concerning the principles whence it arose: Apprehensions spring up with regard to futurity: And the mind, sunk into diffidence, terror, and melancholy, has recourse to every method of appeasing those secret intelligent powers, on whom our fortune is supposed entirely to depend.”
    —David Hume (1711–1776)

    “Keeping accounts, Sir, is of no use when a man is spending his own money, and has nobody to whom he is to account. You won’t eat less beef today, because you have written down what it cost yesterday.”
    —Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)