Ah, the Concorde; the joint development program of the British and French governments that pushed ahead even when the economic benefits of the project were no longer possible. It was designed to be a passenger aircraft capable of supersonic flight but its lasting legacy resides mostly in game theory, where it has been adopted as a description of irrational behavior - the Concorde fallacy. More generally, the process behind the fallacy is known as the sunk cost effect.
As the Concorde example suggests, the problematic behavior in question is when a person continues to engage in a behavior due to their initial investment, even though the payoff is no longer available. In common parlance, this could be described as "knowing when to cut your losses"; or, as a famous philosopher once remarked, "You got to know when you hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when you walk away and know when to run". It was either Descartes or Kenny Rogers, I can never remember.
It is mostly of interest to researchers because these behaviors violate our optimality predictions and instead of engaging in behaviors which maximise returns, there seems to be a consistent deviation towards sub-optimal responding. Initially it was believed to be an irrational approach that was unique to humans (and perhaps even limited to adult humans), which led to the hypothesis suggesting that the phenomenon was a product of higher-order thinking - specifically, the overgeneralisation of a rule like "Don't waste"1. Recent research, however, suggests that this might not be true2, 3.
For example, Kacelnick and Marsh4 looked at the preferences of starlings in a two phase task where they initially had to respond differently on two possible schedules - a high effort schedule (flying 16 times over a 1m distance) and a low effort schedule (flying 4 times over a 1m distance) that were signaled by different colours. In the second phase, the two alternatives had the same effort requirement but they found that the subjects would consistently prefer the alternative that had the same colour as the high effort schedule. The results were interpreted in terms of the sunk cost fallacy by arguing that the level of investment involved with the high effort schedule produced a greater perceived value of that alternative.
