M: Organizational Behavior 2nd Edition by Steven McShane, Mary Von Glinow

Exercise 71

Scenario: Sarine's Dolls
Sarine is currently developing a new line of dolls for her business which she hopes will take her company to the next level. At first, she encountered some minor problems with the construction of the dolls and spent a fair amount of money engineering a way to enable them to be like she envisioned. Unfortunately, she then found out that there was a patent protecting the way the dolls arms were connected, so she spent more money redesigning the dolls. After an unexpectedly uninterested response from the public in the dolls, she decided that they needed to be marketed differently in order to sell. So Sarine allocated more resources to marketing and had the packaging of the dolls redesigned and created new set of advertising materials. The cost of manufacturing these dolls has now exceeded four times the initial proposed cost, but she is determined to make it work.
What could Sarine have done differently in order to avoid this escalation of commitment with her decisions?
A) Ensure that the people who evaluate the decisions are not the people who originally made them.
B) Publicly establish a preset level at which the decision is abandoned or reevaluated.
C) Find a source of systematic and clear feedback.
D) Involve several people in the evaluation of the decision.
E) All answer choices would be effective.