There are interesting examples of this in Go, where pro play commentary often discusses tensions between "cutting your losses" and "being strategically consistent".
If things in Go aren't as clear-cut as the classic utilitarian example of "teleporting into the present situation" (which is typically the way Go programs are written, and they nevertheless lose to top human players), then maybe we can expect that they aren't clear-cut in complex life situations either.
This doesn't detract from the value of teaching people the sunk-cost fallacy: novice Go players do things such as adding stones to an already dead group which are clearly identifiable as instances of the sunk cost fallacy, and improvement reliably follows from helping them identify this as thinking that leads to lost games. Similarly, improvement at life reliably results from improving your ability to tell it's time to cut your losses.
If things in Go aren't as clear-cut as the classic utilitarian example of "teleporting into the present situation" (which is typically the way Go programs are written, and they nevertheless lose to top human players), then maybe we can expect that they aren't clear-cut in complex life situations either.
That's more a fact about Go programs, I think; reading the Riis material recently on the Rybka case, I had the strong impression that modern top-tier chess programs do not do anything at all like building a model or examining the game history, b...
I just finished the first draft of my essay, "Are Sunk Costs Fallacies?"; there is still material I need to go through, but the bulk of the material is now there. The formatting is too gnarly to post here, so I ask everyone's forgiveness in clicking through.
To summarize:
(If any of that seems unlikely or absurd to you, click through. I've worked very hard to provide multiple citations where possible, and fulltext for practically everything.)
I started this a while ago; but Luke/SIAI paid for much of the work, and that motivation plus academic library access made this essay more comprehensive than it would have been and finished months in advance.