Sarine is most likely making decisions to continue with these dolls at this point because of:

Question

Sarine's Dolls
With funding from her family, 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. She is embarrassed by how this has gone, but continues to put on a brave front.

A.  Self-justification
B.  Self-enhancement
C.  A decline of commitment
D.  Prospect theory
E.  Closing costs

Answer 1

A.  Self-justification
Decision makers typically want to appear rational and effective. One such impression-
management tactic is to demonstrate the importance of a decision by continuing to invest in it, whereas pulling the plug symbolizes the project's failure and the decision maker's
incompetence. This self-justification effect is particularly evident when decision makers are
personally identified with the project, have staked their reputations to some extent on the
project's success, and have low self-esteem.