Pulling the Plug to Stop the New Product Drain
通过高管实验发现，管理者在失败的新产品上存在持续投入的偏差，并测试了五种减少该偏差的决策辅助方法，其中引入新决策者效果最佳。
Although an important aspect of managing new product introductions is to recognize and quickly take action when a product launch has failed (i.e., “pull the plug”), senior managers in a new product launch setting tend to remain committed to a losing course of action. The authors investigate this issue with controlled experiments, using senior level executives as subjects. Their results suggest a strong bias toward continued commitment to failing new products. Consequently, the authors devise and test the effectiveness of five decision aids aimed at reducing this bias. Improving the quality of the information environment does not greatly reduce bias, nor does precommitment (at time of launch) to self-specified decisions rules. The most effective methods of reducing commitment to a losing course of action appear to be either precommitment to a predetermined decision rule or introduction of a new decision maker at the time of the stop/no stop decision. Of these two methods, the latter produces marginally less commitment to a losing course of action. However, none of the tested decision procedures completely reduces commitment to a losing course of action relative to the control condition.