{
  "abstract": "A forward-looking decision-maker should ignore costs that cannot be recovered. A large be-\n\nhavioral literature nonetheless reports that prior, irrecoverable investments of money, time,\n\nor effort push people to continue with courses of action they would not otherwise choose.\n\nThis paper reviews that literature with attention to both its strongest findings and its weakest\n\npoints. We separate the sunk cost effect (Arkes & Blumer, 1985) from escalation of commit-\n\nment, which adds personal responsibility for the original decision (Staw, 1976); summarize\n\nlaboratory, professional-sports, and entrepreneurial evidence (Staw & Hoang, 1995; Camerer\n\n& Weber, 1999; Åstebro, Jeffrey, & Adomdza, 2007); and report a meta-analytic estimate of a\n\nmoderate average effect (Roth, Robbert, & Straus, 2015). We then set out the evidence that\n\ncomplicates the textbook account: incentivized and field studies that find small, erratic, or no\n\nsunk-cost effects (Friedman et al., 2007; Ashraf, Berry, & Shapiro, 2010); failed replications of\n\na foundational escalation experiment and of a de-escalation technique (Białek, We¸grzyn, &\n\nMeyers, 2021; Schulz-Hardt et al., 2021); and the argument that responding to sunk costs can\n\nsometimes be rational (McAfee, Mialon, & Mialon, 2010). We conclude with decision-process\n\nsafeguards, distinguishing those with direct experimental support from those that are plausi-\n\nble but untested or contested, as ways of narrowing the resulting Rationality Gap.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [
    "Independent Research"
  ],
  "article_type": null,
  "arxiv": null,
  "author_total": 1,
  "authors": [
    {
      "affs": [
        0
      ],
      "name": "Karim T. Mansour Karim T. Mansour"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/edcswx3ky5p7d.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.5281/zenodo.23556409",
  "fulltext_url": null,
  "id": "edcswx3ky5p7d",
  "issns": [],
  "landing_url": "https://zenodo.org/records/23556409",
  "language": "eng",
  "licence": "CC-BY-4.0",
  "licence_label": "CC BY 4.0",
  "licence_source": "article",
  "licence_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "metadata_licence": null,
  "native_subjects": [],
  "openalex": null,
  "pdf_url": "https://zenodo.org/api/records/23556409/files/Weight_of_the_Past_Sunk_Costs_Mansour.pdf/content",
  "pmcid": null,
  "pmid": null,
  "published": "2026-10-22",
  "publisher": null,
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/edcswx3ky5p7d.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-11-05T12:20:44Z",
      "native_id": "23556409",
      "source": "zenodo",
      "url": "https://zenodo.org/records/23556409"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [],
  "title": "The Weight of the Past: Sunk Costs, Escalation of Commitment, and the Limits of the Evidence",
  "title_text": "The Weight of the Past: Sunk Costs, Escalation of Commitment, and the Limits of the Evidence",
  "type": "preprint",
  "updated_at": "2026-11-05T12:20:44Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/edcswx3ky5p7d",
  "venue": "Zenodo",
  "versions": []
}