"Once escalation takes hold ..."

Deve ter sido isto que aconteceu recentemente com a entrada do Estado no capital do SIRESP:

"Once escalation takes hold, it can be difficult to reverse, but you can reduce the chances of falling into that trap.
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Escalation of commitment is deeply rooted in the human brain. In a classic experiment, two groups of participants were asked whether they would be willing to invest $1 million to develop a stealth bomber. The first group was asked to assume that the project had not yet been launched and that a rival company had already developed a successful (and superior) product. Unsurprisingly, only 16.7% of those participants opted to commit to the funding.
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The second group was asked to assume that the project was already 90% complete. Its members, too, were told that a competitor had developed a superior product. This time 85% opted to commit the resources to complete the project.
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These results underscore the fact that people tend to stick to an existing course of action, no matter how irrational. The project’s likely outcome was identical for both groups. Because a competitor had beaten the company to the market with a superior product, the new product was almost bound to fail. The only difference between the two situations was the timing of the question: before commitment to the project versus when it was nearing completion."

Cuidado com a relação entre humanos e custos afundados. Boa para manter os laços na tribo, má para a racionalidade das decisões de gestão.

Trechos retirados de "Stop Doubling Down on Your Failing Strategy"

O canto da sereia

"Most enterprise managers find business model innovation decision making difficult preferring stay the course than to aim for paradigm shift. One possible explanation for this comes from a bias first described by Barry M. Staw in his 1976 paper, “Knee deep in the big muddy: A study of escalating commitment to a chosen course of action” and called: escalation of commitment or sunken cost fallacy. Even though it is commonly expected that individuals will reverse decisions or change behaviors which result in negative consequences. Yet, based on the cumulative prior investment and despite new evidence suggesting otherwise, within investment decision contexts, negative consequences may actually cause decision makers to increase the commitment of resources (time, money, manpower, emotions) and undergo the risk of further negative consequences."

Trecho retirado de "Why you’re in love with your current business model"

Acerca dos custos afundados

Um artigo que nos faz pensar em alguns políticos e gestores e, esboçar um sorriso amarelo. "Knee-Deep in the Big Muddy: A Study of Escalating Commitment to a Chosen Course of Action" de Barry M. Staw, publcado 1976 na Organizational Behavior and Human Performance.
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Aqui vão os trechos mais salientes:

"It is commonly expected that individuals will reverse decisions or change behaviors which result in negative consequences. Yet, within investment decision contexts, negative consequences may actually cause decision makers to increase the commitment of resources and undergo the risk of further negative consequences.
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Results showed that persons committed the greatest amount of resources to a previously chosen course of action when they were personally responsible for negative consequences.
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Intuitively, one would expect individuals to reverse decisions or to change behaviors which result in negative consequences. Yet, there seem to be many important instances in which persons do not respond as expected to the reward/cost contingencies of their environments. Specifically, when a person's behavior leads to negative consequences we may find that the individual will, instead of changing his behavior, cognitively distort the negative consequences to more positively valenced outcomes.
The phenomenon underlying this biasing of behavioral outcomes is often said to be a self-justification process in which individuals seek to rationalize their previous behavior or psychologically defend themselves against adverse consequences."