Imagine you paid twenty dollars for a ticket to a local amateur play. The day of the show, a friend surprises you with a free ticket to an exclusive concert featuring your favorite musician. Do you choose to go to the play or the concert? When behavioral economists run this type of experiment, they find most people will stick to the less attractive option (the play) because they paid for the ticket. This is an example of the sunk cost fallacy in action.
Our minds are easily trapped by sunk costs. According to Investopedia, a sunk cost is a cost that has already been incurred and thus cannot be recovered. While this concept is often discussed around investments of money, sunk costs also include time and resources. Think of how often an organization will add patches to clunky system instead of ditching it to build a new one. People will stubbornly remain committed to a project that is going nowhere because of all the work put into it, even if results remain elusive.
Remember, a sunk cost is not recoverable, which gives rise to the famous expression, “Chasing good money after bad.” The trick is to evaluate the current status of a project, investment, or commitment in light of where it stands now and ignore past contributions. This way, it is possible to stay nimble and take advantage of better opportunities when they arise.
More information on sunk costs, especially around money, can be found in the book, Dollars and Sense: How we Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter, by Dan Ariely and Jeff Kresisler.
In this book, Head in the Cloud, author William Poundstone explores the question of whether all this online information is only serving to make us less informed. Online information is easier to skim, but hard to dive into deeply. Poundstone specifically highlights a phenomenon known as the Dunning-Kruger effect which can lead people to overestimate their own level of knowledge in a subject area.
This is a question of great interest to behavioral economist Dan Ariely. So much so that he did several experiments which aimed to probe deep into how people assign value to the work they do. The results of the experiments were shared in a TED Talk. From the video description:
Illusory Superiority is a cognitive bias whereby individuals overestimate their own qualities and abilities relative to others. It is sometimes called the Lake Wobegon Effect after 
Optimal stopping : when to stop looking
To be clear, this curse has nothing to do with magic or ancient mystical tombs. The Curse of Knowledge is a cognitive bias that occurs when individuals are unable to ignore the knowledge they have which others do not, or when they are unable to disregard information already processed. This is the reason why an expert musician can make a lousy teacher of novices, because the expert forgets what it is like to know so little.
entails searching through the available alternatives until an acceptability threshold is met. (Satisficing = Satisfy + Suffice) Often this is a viable strategy since searching for the perfect product or solution would run into the law of diminishing returns where additional effort leads to fewer results. So a natural tendency is to find the first good choice and stop there. While satisficing can be a good short term option, it may result in long term inefficiencies. The quick purchase of running shoes now could produce regret over the colors and painful blisters a few days later.
Efficient Librarian 