The escalation of commitment and affect

The escalation of commitment has been an important research topic in managerial decision making for decades. Researchers have identified various cognitive and affective factors influencing individuals’ propensity to allocate additional resources to failing courses of action. This literature is however suffering from fragmentation in term of the diversity of conceptual lenses and the cognition–affect divide. In this thesis, I propose a “process model of affect and the escalation of commitment” to provide coherence to existing literature. This process model suggests that escalation situations are events to be appraised by decision makers; cognitive appraisals of escalation situations elicit integral emotions which directly impinge on escalation decisions. Moreover, incidental affect creates the context through which decision makers appraise escalation situations; it shapes escalation decisions via biasing appraisal content and influencing the amount of information deliberation. According to this process model, affective and cognitive antecedents jointly influence escalation decisions in multiple ways: affect can mediate as well as moderate the impacts of cognitive antecedents on escalation, it can also biases decision makers’ perception of cognitive antecedents, imposing an indirect effect on escalation. Two sets of laboratory studies are reported in this thesis to illustrate the joint influence of affect and cognition on escalation. Study 1 shows that integral regret mediates the influence of personal responsibility on escalation. Studies 2 and 3 demonstrate that incidental pride weakens the effects of personal responsibility and expectancy-related information on escalation. Implications of the process model and the three empirical studies are discussed