The Role of Project Completion Information in Resource Allocation Decisions

Together on the path to construction innovation: yet another example of escalation of commitment?

“…These experiments suggest that, once a firm starts to participate in a collaborative innovation project it may escalate commitment (for examples, see Arkes and Blumer, 1985;Conlon and Garland, 1993). A firm is said to escalate commitment when, for reasons that are not economic, it decides to allocate additional resources to continue the project (Staw, 1976;Schmidt and Calantone, 2002).…”

The impact of biased information and corresponding meta-information on escalating commitment

“…This is usually the case in escalation studies, even if investment cases are used. Notably, then, studies by Conlon and Garland (1993) and Garland and Conlon (1998) using case studies comparable to the one we used showed qualitatively similar reinvestment behavior in US undergraduate students, Chinese graduate students, advanced US MBA students, and experienced bank managers (with the latter two samples being considerably older). However, even if the reinvestment behavior itself is comparable between students and managers, we cannot rule out that students (or young adults) utilize advice and/or meta-information about biases in the advice differently than experienced managers (or older adults).…”

Progress framing and sunk costs: How managers’ statements about project progress reveal their investment intentions

“…Statements about the amount of money already used indicate, at the same time, how much money will be lost, or wasted, if the project is discontinued. Statements about the amount of work done might express a similar concern (how much work would be wasted), but suggest in addition how close the project is to completion, perhaps stimulating the work completion motive (Conlon & Garland, 1993;Garland & Conlon, 1998). Experiment 1 was designed as a test of these predictions.…”

“…The scenario description had several similar elements to Arkes and Blumer's (1985) original radar plane scenario that later has been used in several sunk cost experiments (Conlon & Garland, 1993;Garland & Newport, 1991;Garland & Conlon, 1998;Moon, 2001). For a translation of the full scenario, see Appendix.…”