Risk Attitude, Decision Responsibility And Degree Of Commitment To Upgrade The Completion Of The Project

Decisions need to be made in our daily life.With the development of thepsychology of decision making, more and more researchers found that people are notalways rationally when they make decisions, such as escalation of commitment whichwas defined as an irrational behavior in the psychology of decision making. Themeaning of the escalation of commitment is that although the decision made in theprevious project leaded to negative feedback, the decison maker continues to investthe orinigal project. Since the concept of the escalation of commitment was presentedby Staw in1976, many researchers have deeply explored this phenomenon and hopeto find out the reason.Based on the previous studies, we explore how the risk attitude, responsibility ofdecision making and project completion influence the behavior of escalation ofcommitment.The experiment used a2(risk attitude: the risk aversion, the riskseeking)×3(project completion:80%,50%,20%)×2(responsibility of decision making:responsible participants,non-responsible participants)mixed design.Project completionis within-subjects variable, Risk attitude and responsibility of decision making arebetween-subjects variables. The possibility to continue invest the project is thedependent variable.The results showed that:(1) The risk attitude significantly influenced the escalation of commitment,Participants who are risk seeking have much more escalation of commitment thanparticipants who are risk aversion.(2) The project completion ignificantly influenced the escalation of commitment.Under the80%project completion, the decision makers’ willingness to continue toinvest in the original project is the highest, under the50%project completion, theirdesire is lower than the decision makers under the80%project completion, and underthe20%project completion, their desire is the lowest.(3) The project completion and the responsibility of decision making have significantly interaction effect. Under the low project completion, the participantswho have responsibility of decision making have much more escalation ofcommitment than participants who don’t have responsibility of decision making.