A critical evaluation of different interventions against escalation of commitment

承诺的升级意味着决策者坚持失败的行动（Staw, 1976）。为了避免由于不断升级的承诺而造成时间或财政资源的大量浪费，开发了几种干预措施，并经经验证明是有效的。然而，在之前的所有研究中，终止有问题的项目是正确的解决方案，只要干预措施导致参与者减少再投资或提前终止项目，就被认为是有效的。这导致了两个问题：首先，不可能区分承诺升级倾向的实际减少和参与者风险厌恶的简单增加，因为在项目失败的情况下，两者都会导致再投资减少。这又导致第二个问题，即每当一个项目最终成功时- -尽管最初遇到挫折- -现有的干预措施可能产生矛盾的效果，例如项目过早终止或再投资不足。这是至关重要的，因为在某些条件下，决策者倾向于过度降低他们的承诺，从而违反规范理性（Heath, 1995）。因此，当前研究计划的目标是对先前和据称有效的干预措施进行批判性评估，以对抗不断升级的承诺，并提出和评估两种新的干预措施。

Escalation of commitment denotes decision makers¿ persisting in a losing course of action (Staw, 1976). In order to avoid the massive wasting of time or financial resources due to escalating commitment, several interventions were developed and found to be effective, empirically. However, in all previous studies abortion of the questionable project is the correct solution, and interventions are deemed effective whenever they lead to participants reinvesting less or aborting a project earlier. This causes two problems: first, it is impossible to differentiate between an actual reduction in the tendency to escalate commitment on one hand and a simple increase in participants’ risk aversion on the other, because in case of a failing project both lead to reduced reinvestments. This, in turn, leads to the second problem namely that whenever a project is ultimately successful - despite initial setbacks - existing interventions might produce paradoxical effects such as premature termination of a project or insufficient reinvestments. This is crucial because under certain conditions decision makers tend to overly deescalate their commitment, thereby violating normative rationality (Heath, 1995). Hence, the objective of the current research proposal is a critical evaluation of the previous and supposedly effective interventions against escalating commitment as well as proposing and evaluating two new interventions.