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CLASS ID: ARCH-SUNK-COST-LOCK

Sunk Cost Anchor Lock

Commitment Escalation & Abort Threshold Paralysis

Operators and leadership continue pouring resources and operational risk into a visibly failing trajectory due to past capital, reputation, or time investments.

Structural Invariant Analysis
Critical Multi-Node (Level 4)Sev 8.4/10

Abort thresholds are dynamically raised to avoid formalizing past losses, allowing deterministic ruin trajectories to reach full physical fruition.

Failure Invariant Breach
Primary Primitives: Decision_Node, Buffer_Reserve, Constraint_Boundary
Absent Safety Recovery Mechanism
System Dynamics Reference: Escalation / Trap of Prior Investment

Domains Historically Vulnerable

Mega-Engineering InfrastructureAlgorithmic Deployment RollbacksDefense ProcurementPharmaceutical Clinical Trials

Primary Invariant Primitives

[Decision_Node][Buffer_Reserve][Constraint_Boundary]

Derived Structural Failure Patterns (1)

PAT-7701-SUNK-CONCORDE
VEC:AUTH:0.94COUP:0.62LAT:0.78OVR:0.89

Prestige Commitment Lock & Commercial Abort Paralysis

Governments continue funding supersonic commercial airliner development long after sonic boom overland bans and jet fuel economics prove commercial failure, trapped by past treaties and international prestige.

1 Verified IncidentsView Pattern Audit →

Verified Public Incident Dossiers (1)

BEA-AAR-2000-0725Commercial Supersonic Aviation

Air France Flight 4590: Concorde Runway Titanium Strip Fuel Tank Hydrodynamic Shock

Tire fragment transmitted hydraulic kinetic wave through liquid fuel Buffer_Reserve. Fuel tank skin Constraint_Boundary failed from interior hydrostatic pressure pulse, severing engine thrust channels.