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:
- sunk costs are probably issues in big organizations
- but maybe not ones that can be helped
- sunk costs are not issues in animals
- they appear to be in children & adults
- but many apparent problems can be explained as part of a learning strategy
- there are few clear indications sunk costs are genuine problems
- much of what we call 'sunk cost' looks like simple carelessness & thoughtlessness
(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.
And if it isn't, as I conclude (after an introduction discussing the difference between being valid in a simplified artificial model and the real world!), then it's perfectly legitimate to ask whether accusations of sunk cost fallacy - which are endemic and received wisdom - are themselves fallacious. Sheesh. I feel as if I were discussing someone's credibility and someone said 'but that's an ad hominem!'. Yes. Yes, it is.
(Notice your Wikipedia link is full of hypotheticals and description, and not real world evidence.)
People do not discuss sunk cost because it is a theorem in some mathematical model or a theoretical way possible agents might fail to maximize utility; they discuss it because they think it is real and serious. If I conclude that it isn't serious, then in what sense am I not trying to overturn a basic principle?
Finally, your criticism of the title or what overreaching you perceive in it aside, did you have any actual criticism like missing refs or anything?
Precisely. The wikipedia article set out to explain what the Sunk Cost Fallacy is and did it. It did not set out to answer any of the dozens of questions which would make sense as titles to your post (such as "Is the sunk cost fallacy a problem in humans?") and so real world 'evidence' wouldn't make much sense. Just like filling up the article on No True Scottsman with evidence about whether True Scottsman actually do like haggis would be rather ... (read more)