"sunk costs fallacy" meaning in English

See sunk costs fallacy in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: sunk costs fallacies [plural]
Head templates: {{en-noun|head=sunk costs fallacy}} sunk costs fallacy (plural sunk costs fallacies)
  1. The phenomenon where somebody justifies an increased investment of money or other resources based on the cumulative prior investment (the sunk costs), despite new evidence suggesting that the cost of continuing now outweighs the expected benefit. Wikipedia link: sunk costs fallacy Related terms: throw good money after bad, double down
    Sense id: en-sunk_costs_fallacy-en-noun-adi6RhB6 Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header

Inflected forms

Download JSON data for sunk costs fallacy meaning in English (1.2kB)

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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-01 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.