sunk cost: loss aversion or Bayesian failure?

Loss aversion is a natural selection emotion tied to survival. Loss has a finite bottom boundary -- no bananas means starvation and death -- whereas acquisition has an infinite or unbounded superfluity. No one needs forty billion bananas and using them takes some effort and imagination, like maybe using them for bribes towards world domination. The normal person wants to assure herself first that there's something to eat tonight. World domination later, if we're still interested after dinner.

So sunk cost fallacy is an emotional attachment to what's been spent. But it is also a failure of Bayesian analysis of time. So you stay in the movie theater not only because you don't want to throw away the ticket you spent money on, but also because that emotional attachment -- loss aversion -- has blindt you to the time outside the theater. The ticket has focused on the loss rate of leaving: 100% of the next hour will be lost. But that's forgetting all the value outside the theater. 

This Bayesian interpretation predicts that people whose time is extremely valuable -- people with many jobs or jobs that have high returns whether in financial wealth or real wealth (personal rewards) are less likely to stay in the theater. Their focus will be trained on the time outside the theater. The losses will be adjusted for the broader context of the normal. We should expect that the very busy or very productive will be resistant to the fallacy. 

Of course, there's also the rich who don't worry about throwing a ticket away, the marginal value of which money is low or worthless. But overall, the sunk cost fallacy should occur only with people who have time to waste, whose time is not pressingly valuable. The sunk cost fallacy may be an arithmetic fallacy of focus, not just an evolutionary psychology of risk-aversion.