Escalation of commitment in the public sector: the impacts of electoral effects and visualization aids on blame avoiding behavior
实验发现，当选官员在选举前比选举后更容易对失败项目追加投入（承诺升级），但可视化工具能有效缓解这种非理性行为，对政策制定者和公共管理者有参考价值。
Our study examines why economically failing public projects are often irrationally terminated too late. Furthermore, we study how this phenomenon known as escalation of commitment (EoC) can be mitigated by visualization aids. Drawing on self-justification theory and blame avoidance theory, our experiment with 283 elected politicians shows that politicians escalate significantly stronger before elections than afterwards. However, visualization aids can counteract escalation even before elections. Our findings contribute to the literature of blame avoidance and the performance information use literature by using escalation literature to identify a factor of ‘motivational change’ by politicians to counteract psychological and/or strategic misbehaviour.