Stochastic Model for Sunk Cost Bias

Jon Kleinberg, Sigal Oren, Manish Raghavan, Nadav Sklar

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

Abstract

We present a novel model for capturing the behavior of an agent exhibiting sunk-cost bias in a stochastic environment. Agents exhibiting sunk-cost bias take into account the effort they have already spent on an endeavor when they evaluate whether to continue or abandon it. We model planning tasks in which an agent with this type of bias tries to reach a designated goal. Our model structures this problem as a type of Markov decision process: loosely speaking, the agent traverses a directed acyclic graph with probabilistic transitions, paying costs for its actions as it tries to reach a target node containing a specified reward. The agent’s sunk cost bias is modeled by a cost that it incurs for abandoning the traversal: if the agent decides to stop traversing the graph, it incurs a cost of λ ·Csunk, where λ ≥ 0 is a parameter that captures the extent of the bias and Csunk is the sum of costs already invested. We analyze the behavior of two types of agents: naive agents that are unaware of their bias, and sophisticated agents that are aware of it. Since optimal (bias-free) behavior in this problem can involve abandoning the traversal before reaching the goal, the bias exhibited by these types of agents can result in sub-optimal behavior by shifting their decisions about abandonment. We show that in contrast to optimal agents, it is computationally hard to compute the optimal policy for a sophisticated agent. Our main results quantify the loss exhibited by these two types of agents with respect to an optimal agent. We present both general and topology-specific bounds.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1279-1288
Number of pages10
JournalProceedings of Machine Learning Research
Volume161
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2021
Event37th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, UAI 2021 - Virtual, Online
Duration: 27 Jul 202130 Jul 2021

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Software
  • Control and Systems Engineering
  • Statistics and Probability

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