Comment on Sunk Cost Fallacy

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 22:22:03 GMT

I was thinking of situations when abandoning course is what you want to do, because it allows you to "cut your losses" and avoid the unpleasantness to follow. Staying the course in that sort of situation would be a form of self-punishment, done with full acknowledgment of the mistakes you made.

Sometimes a strong, harsh lesson is a better instructor than many small, mildly unpleasant lessons.

EDIT: I guess nobody here agrees that sitting through a bad movie unnecessarily might be more unpleasant than leaving immediately but having wasted $10. Or is it that you disagree that imposing the punishment that honors the sunk cost could ever be more effective than the strategy of abandonment? If you can abandon strategy at any point from conception to completion, you can abandon when sunk cost is low or nonexistent and costs to be beared still are very high, or sunk cost is high and still to bear is low, or anywhere in between, including something like 25% sunk/75% unsunk, when 25% might not make much of an impression on you and thus won't change your behavior but 75% would make a sufficiently stronger impression that the behavior is changed.

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