Information Requests in the Context of Escalation

Staw's (1981) theory of escalation, that decision makers who are responsible for a failure will be more retrospectively oriented than those who are not responsible for a failure, was tested by monitoring the information requests of subjects performing the Adams and Smith decision case (Staw, 1976). A total of 72 Master of Business Administration (MBA) students completed a computer-administered version of the case, in which they were permitted to request information files that had been preclassified as retrospective or prospective on the basis of the results of data collected from a different sample of MBA students. We found that 75% of the subjects who were responsible for a previous failure requested retrospective information, compared to about 25% of the subjects who were not responsible for a failure. This significant difference (i.e., p < .05) supported Staw's theory. We also found that the information manipulation eliminated the tendency of subjects who were responsible for failure to escalate allocations.