The sunk cost fallacy is typically covered in introductory economics courses. It is among the most important biases that influence decision making. Ronayne et al. (2021a,b) find evidence of behavior consistent with the sunk cost effect and utilize eight questions that measure individuals'...

The paper studies the canonical hold-up problem with one-sided investment by the buyer and full ex post bargaining power by the seller. The buyer can covertly choose any distribution of valuations at a cost and privately observes her valuation. The main result shows that in contrast to the...

Robert S. Pindyck has made significant contributions to a wide and diverse range of economic literatures; summarizing them is challenging. To keep the length of this review manageable, I confine my discussion to four areas in which his contributions have been particularly notable: (i) economic...

Subsidiaries are important in the global strategy of multinational enterprises (MNEs). However, in the face of uncertainty and competition, the decision to divest a subsidiary from a market becomes a critical decision for MNEs. This study suggests that the factors for divesting subsidiaries are...

This paper deals with trade platforms whose operators not only allow third party sellers to offer their products to consumers, but also offer products themselves. In this context, the platform operator faces a hold-up problem if he uses classical twopart tariffs only as potential competition...

This study introduces a hold-up cost (i.e., the cost of acquiring information regarding a transacting partner's relationship-specific investment to substantiate the need for contract renegotiation) in the model of the property-rights theory. As is widely accepted, the costs of accessing relevant...

We empirically investigate whether firms lower information frictions in foreign sourcing through prior exporting. Using a panel of Slovenian manufacturing firms in the period 1996-2011, we estimate the probability of import entry in a new market when the firm is already exporting to the same...

What drives investment in automation technologies? This paper documents a positive relationship between labor-friendly institutions and investment in industrial robots in a sample of developing and advanced economies. Institutions explain a substantial share of cross-country variation in...

This paper offers a unified framework to analyze both short- and long-run trade dynamics with heterogeneous firms in a consistent manner. The model embeds the classical theory of export hysteresis into a continuous-time trade model with heterogeneous firms, and considers the effects of both...

This paper documents a positive relationship between labor-friendly institutions and investment in industrial robots in a sample of advanced economies. Institutions explain a substantial proportion of cross-country variation in automation. The relationship between institutions and robots is...

In this paper we argue that an important source of the recent increase in outsourcing is the computer and information technology revolution, characterized by increased rates of technological change. Our model shows that an increase in the pace of technological change increases outsourcing...

Governments frequently intervene to support domestic industries, but a surprising amount of this support goes to ailing sectors. We explain this with a lobbying model that allows for entry and sunk costs. Specifically, policy is influenced by pressure groups that incur lobbying expenses to...

Sunk costs play a central role in antitrust economics, but are often misunderstood and mismeasured. I will try to clarify some of the conceptual and empirical issues related to sunk costs, and explain their implications for antitrust analysis. I will be particularly concerned with the role of...

This paper addresses the impact on investment incentives of the network sharing arrangements mandated by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, with a focus on the implications of irreversible investment. Although the goal is to promote competition, the sharing rules now in place reduce incentives...

This paper presents a dynamic model that analyzes how firms' expectations with regards to technological change influence the demand for outsourcing. We show that outsourcing becomes more beneficial to the firm when technology is changing rapidly. As the pace of innovations in production...

The inefficiencies related to endogenous product creation and variety under monopolistic competition are two-fold: one static—the misalignment between consumers and producers regarding the value of a new variety; and one dynamic—time variation in markups. Quantitatively, the welfare costs of...

This paper examines the sunk cost fallacy as a self-commitment device in mitigating self-control problems and analyzes its implications for contract design. The sunk cost fallacy can lead to over-consumption and escalation of commitment. We show that consumers anticipate the fallacy ex-ante, and...

Purpose: Managerial accounting education generally insists that managers should never consider sunk costs. This suggestion seems inconsistent with a common mode of thinking about future rewards: quasi-hyperbolic discounting. This paper aims to explore the conflict between sunk cost consideration...

The sunk cost effect is considered as an important bias and perceived to be a widespread phenomenon in individual decisions. However, the evidence from field data and field and laboratory experiments is inconclusive. We present a laboratory experiment, designed to investigate the sunk cost bias...

We study the effects of aggregate and idiosyncratic uncertainty on the entry of firms, total investment, and prices in a competitive industry with irreversible investment. We first use standard dynamic programming methods to determine firms' entry decisions, and we describe the resulting...

We provide experimental evidence of behavior consistent with the sunk cost effect. Subjects who earned a lottery via a real-effort task were given an opportunity to switch to a dominant lottery; 23% chose to stick with their dominated lottery. The endowment effect accounts for roughly only one...

Evidence from hypothetical scenarios strongly suggests the existence of a sunk cost bias, the tendency to ‘throw good money after bad money.’ However, the few studies using incentives are inconclusive. In addition, evidence on potential psychological channels underlying such a bias is...

We show how a monopolistic owner of oil reserves responds to a carbon-free substitute becoming available at some uncertain point in the future if demand is isoelastic and variable extraction costs are zero but upfront exploration investment costs have to be made. Not the arrival of this...

The paper estimates the lower bound for market concentration taking as reference the framework advanced by Sutton (1991). Quantile regression methods were considered in the context of the Brazilian manufacturing industry in 2005 and separate estimates were obtained for exogenous and endogenous...

In this article, we analyse the interactions between financial and start-up decisions in an oligopolistic framework, where firms compete to enter a new market. We show that preemption can substantially reduce the negative effects of credit rationing on start-up investment decisions

We analyze the impact of progressive taxation on irreversible investment under uncertainty. We show that if tax exemption is lower than sunk cost, higher tax rate will decelerate optimal investment by increasing the optimal investment threshold, while if tax exemption exceeds sunk cost, three...

We consider an economy in which firms need to invest in capital before they can advertise a job, while applicants may have to compete for jobs. Our aim is to investigate how this competition affects the investment decisions of firms. Our first result shows that the economy always generates the...

The degree of endemic volatility in the number of firms and establishments varies considerably across industries. Examining the within-industry range of variation (max.-min.) of the number of firms over our sample period, the low and high values across U.S. manufacturing industries are 4 and...