Why choose wisely if you have already paid? Sunk costs elicit stochastic dominance violations
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Sunk costs have been known to elicit violations of expected utility theory, in particular, the independence or cancellation axiom. Separately, violations of the stochastic dominance principle have been demonstrated in various settings despite the fact that descriptive models of choice favored in economics deem such violations irrational. However, it is currently unknown whether sunk costs also yield stochastic dominance violations. In two studies using a tri-colored roulette wheel choice task with non-equiprobable events yet equal payoffs, we observed that those who had sunk costs selected a stochastically dominated option significantly more than did those who had no costs. Moreover, a second study revealed that people chose a stochastically dominated option significantly more when the expected value was low compared to high. A model comparison of psychological explanations demonstrated that theories that incorporate a reference shift of the status quo could predict these sunk cost-based violations of stochastic dominance whereas other models could not.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it