sunk costs and the "Economics" of sense making in ambiguous situations

Two important areas of decision making research, the so called sunk cost theory and the sense making theory, have both focused their attention on similar cognitive attitudes while providing opposite evaluations. In fact, they both look at retrospective reasoning as a means to provide justification to current courses of actions, and look at escalating behaviours as a way to commit to such interpretations. On the contrary, when evaluating such behaviours, the former provides a negative account (stating that such cognitive attitudes are irrational), while the latter a positive one (stating that such attitudes are perfectly plausible). Moreover, they both find a quite interesting linkage in the notion of ambiguity, being such quality both the premise to sense making, and the foundation of one major critics, the decision dilemma theory, to the presumed irrationality of such behaviours. In this paper, starting from the concept of ambiguity, we present how such perspectives could!complement each other and, moreover, entail the possibility to heavily reposition sunk cost research as a protagonist in the field of epistemology as the economic foundation of a constructivist approach to interpretative processes