Owner–managers of private family businesses are vulnerable to escalation of commitment, which can lead to costly failure. In an effort to help private family businesses reduce such costs and contribute to the resource dependence literature, we extend prior research on escalation of commitment...

Given the increasing commitment associated with NCAA Division I participation, higher learning institutions in the United States have recently engaged in initial stages of de-escalation behavior, or the reversal of escalating commitment via project termination or redirection. However, difficulty...

Maximizing the probability of bypassing an aspiration level, and taking increasing risks to recover previous losses are well-documented behavioral tendencies. They are compatible with individual utility functions that are S-shaped, as suggested in Prospect Theory (Kahneman and Tversky 1979). We...

The purpose of this study is to better understand whether emotional aspects affect entrepreneurs’ and owner-managers’ decisions in investment situations when escalation of commitment can be observed and where the level of uncertainty was also added to the emotional aspect. The study was...

We use Vickrey uniform auctions to provide an indirect robustness test of the endowment effect. Our panel data promotes two results: (1) evidence of the endowment effect exists in that risk seeking behavior following losses is less severe for 'out of pocket' losses as opposed to foregone gain....

The relationship banking literature suggests that business relationships play an important role in the loan decisions of small banks. We test one aspect of this hypothesis using a cross-sectional panel dataset of small banks located in Texas from 1994 to 2002. Our results suggest that small...