Study on Commitment Escalation Based on the Self-esteem Level of Decision-makers and the Sunk Cost of a Program

The phenomenon of "commitment escalation" originated from decision makers, and is part never encountered by traditional risk control theory. The phenomenon of commitment escalation frequently occurs in decision making of an enterprise, which seriously affects cultural establishment and training of core competition of the enterprise. In order to search for explanatory variables of "commitment escalation", authors of this article introduced "self-esteem level" and "sunk cost level" for examination, employed scenario simulation experiment and the analytical technique of contingency table for a statistic test. The research results indicate that, when faced up with the high level of sunk cost, the decision maker is more likely to choose commitment escalation than when faced up with the low level of sunk cost, no matter the self-esteem level of the decision maker is high or low; when faced up with the same level of sunk cost, the decision maker with high self-esteem level is believed to be much more likely to choose commitment escalation than the one with low self-esteem level.