Dealing with sunk costs
When the Haas School of Business (U. C. Berkeley) moved to its new building in 1995, each classroom was equipped with a podium that contained a computer and other hardware to allow anything that could be displayed on the computer's screen to also be projected onto a large screen at the front of the class. The computers installed in the podiums were, at the time, the state of the art Mac/PC compromise machines, "swing-Macs" made by Apple.
Unfortunately, the swing-Macs didn't "swing" as well as had been hoped. Faculty who used PC software on them frequently were faced with computer crashes and freeze-ups in the middle of a class. Someone suggested that, since nearly all of the faculty use PCs, it would be better to install PC fully compatible machines instead. As a faculty member put it, "I bet we could replace the "swing-Macs" for $1,500 per classroom." To which another faculty member replied: "Look, those swing-Macs cost $5,000 each. I don't know what it would cost to replace them with cheap PCs, but that's not the point. We can't just scrap twelve $5,000 computers. The school has to be more careful with its resources." (The latter faculty member was the one who had the idea of installing "swing-Macs" to begin with.)
Source: based on the case study "Computers in the New Haas Classrooms," by Severin Borenstein, 1997.