Caring About Sunk Costs: A Behavioral Solution to Holdup Problems with Small Stakes
本文证明在简单的团队生产环境中，在意沉没成本反而能帮助参与者实现有效投资，并在复杂环境下成为唯一有效的解决方案，为日常双边谈判中的行为提供解释。
Economics students need to be taught that opportunity costs are important for optimal decision making but that sunk costs are not. Why should this be? Presumably these students have been making optimal decisions all their lives, and the concepts should be easy for them. We show that caring about sunk costs can help agents achieve efficient investments in a simple team production environment. Furthermore, the solution we propose is uniquely efficient if the environment is sufficiently complex. Hence, in addition to explaining contract form and ownership (Williamson, 1975; Hart, 1995), studies of the holdup problem may also provide insights into observed behavior in day-today bilateral bargaining problems. Copyright 2003, Oxford University Press.