Sunk-Cost Bias
The tendency to continue investing time or capital in an effort because of resources already committed, rather than because of forward-looking expected value. In analyst work, sunk-cost bias shows up as reluctance to kill an idea after weeks of diligence, even when the kill criteria have triggered or the pre-mortem has surfaced a fatal assumption. The corrective is to write kill criteria up front, ask a senior reader to do the pre-mortem independently, and treat the diligence hours already spent as not-relevant to the forward decision.
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