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A type of decision-making error made by human and non-human animals alike when continuing to invest in a continued task based solely on justifying past investment of money, time, or effort instead of on assessing incremental costs or the benefits offered by current options irrespective of what has happened before.
The Concorde project was an Anglo-French joint enterprise which, in its early development stages, showed two characteristics: it would experience significant cost overruns when compared to its initial studies and that there was no assurance of profit. Both governments continued to fund the construction of the Concorde on the grounds that they had already placed substantial investment in it. Such rationale is taken as a fallacy as standard microeconomic theory states that only prospective (future) costs should be relevant to the decision-making process (Arkes & Ayton, 1999; Roth et al., 2014). That is, at any given moment...
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References
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Vasconcelos, Í.G. (2023). Concorde Fallacy. In: Shackelford, T.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Sexual Psychology and Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08956-5_159-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08956-5_159-1
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