Getting out of the Big-Muddy: Escalation of Commitment in LLMs

Abstract: LLMs are increasingly deployed in autonomous decision-making roles across high-stakes domains. However, since models are trained on human-generated data, they may inherit cognitive biases that systematically distort human judgment, including escalation of commitment, where decision-makers continue investing in failing courses of action due to prior investment. Understanding when LLMs exhibit such biases presents a unique challenge. While these biases are well-documented in humans, it remains unclear whether they manifest consistently in LLMs or require specific triggering conditions. This paper investigates this question using a two-stage investment task across four experimental conditions: model as investor, model as advisor, multi-agent deliberation, and compound pressure scenario. Across N = 6,500 trials, we find that bias manifestation in LLMs is highly context-dependent. In individual decision-making contexts (Studies 1-2, N = 4,000), LLMs demonstrate strong rational cost-benefit logic with minimal escalation of commitment. However, multi-agent deliberation reveals a striking hierarchy effect (Study 3, N = 500): while asymmetrical hierarchies show moderate escalation rates (46.2%), symmetrical peer-based decision-making produces near-universal escalation (99.2%). Similarly, when subjected to compound organizational and personal pressures (Study 4, N = 2,000), models exhibit high degrees of escalation of commitment (68.95% average allocation to failing divisions). These findings reveal that LLM bias manifestation depends critically on social and organizational context rather than being inherent, with significant implications for the deployment of multi-agent systems and unsupervised operations where such conditions may emerge naturally.