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 sunk and/or cost:

    Words convey the mental treasures of one period to the generations that follow; and laden with this, their precious freight, they sail safely across gulfs of time in which empires have suffered shipwreck and the languages of common life have sunk into oblivion.
    —Anonymous. Quoted in Richard Chevenix Trench, On the Study of Words, lecture 1 (1858)

    The President has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To preserve for a short time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is content to eat dust before the real masters who stand erect behind the throne.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)