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.
For ideal agents, absolutely. For things like humans... Have you looked at the models in "Do Sunk Costs Matter?", McAfee et al 2007?
EDIT: I've incorporated all the relevant bits of McAfee now, and there are one or two other papers looking at sunk cost-like models where the behavior is useful or leads to better equilibria.
0Dmytry
Of course. But what works, works; you'd cripple an agent by dispelling it's fallacies without providing alternatives.
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.