Sunk-cost fallacy

What it is

Continuing an endeavour because of what has already been invested (time, money, effort) rather than by weighing future costs and benefits.

Related

• Cognitive dissonance bias
  Admitting that past effort was wasted is dissonant, so we justify it by continuing.
• Loss aversion bias
  Abandoning a project feels like making the loss real, so we keep throwing resources at it.
• Commitment and consistency bias
  Having committed, we feel pressure to stay consistent with it.
• Effort justification bias
  Past effort makes the thing feel more valuable, so we keep going.
• "Get worse before it gets better" fallacy bias
  Believing that things will pay off later justifies enduring costs now.

Appears in

• The 99 thinking errors in Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly#5: Sunk cost fallacy

References

• Wikipedia: Sunk-cost fallacy en.wikipedia.org
• The 99 thinking errors in Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia: List of cognitive biases en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia: Cognitive bias codex en.wikipedia.org

More in “Deciding and acting: incentives, loss and commitment”