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 looks as if
    Some pallid thing had squashed its features flat
    And its eyes shut with overeagerness
    To see what people found so interesting
    In one another, and had gone to sleep
    Of its own stupid lack of understanding,
    Or broken its white neck of mushroom stuff
    Short off, and died against the windowpane.”
    Robert Frost (1874–1963)

    To exist as an advertisement of her husband’s income, or her father’s generosity, has become a second nature to many a woman who must have undergone, one would say, some long and subtle process of degradation before she sunk [sic] so low, or grovelled so serenely.
    Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)

    The one regret I have about my own abortions is that they cost money that might otherwise have been spent on something more pleasurable, like taking the kids to movies and theme parks.
    Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)