Sunk Cost Fallacy in Driving the World’s Costliest Cars
研究沉没成本如何影响新加坡车主驾驶行为，发现沉没成本每增加1%，驾驶量增加0.048%，导致2009至2013年间每月多开86公里。
We develop a behavioral model of durable good usage with mental accounting for sunk costs. It predicts higher-than-rational usage that attenuates at a rate that increases with sunk costs. Singapore government policy varied the sunk cost of buying a new car. Using Singapore data, we estimate the elasticity of driving with respect to sunk costs to be 0.048, which implies that government policy between 2009 and 2013 was associated with 86 kilometers per month, or 5.6%, more driving. The results are robust to specifying sunk costs as relative to buyer income and estimation with Hong Kong data. We believe this to be the first field evidence of the sunk cost fallacy in usage of a major durable good. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2651 . This paper was accepted by John List, behavioral economics.