Retrospective (past) costs that have already been incurred and cannot be recovered.

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BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

The question asks about retrospective (past) costs that have already been incurred and cannot be recovered.
Option a: Explicit Cost. These are out-of-pocket monetary payments or actual cash expenditures that are easily observed, such as wages or rent. While explicit costs are real costs, they are not specifically defined as past and unrecoverable in the way sunk costs are, so this option is not the best fit for the given definition.
Option b: Implicit Cost. Implicit costs represent the opportunity costs of using resources you already own, such as the owner’s time or potential alternative uses of capital. They are not necessarily incurred as cash payments and aren’t inherently about irrecoverable past expenditures, so this is not the correct characterization.
Option c: Fixed Cost. Fixed costs are expenses that do not change with the level of output in the short run (like a rent payment). They describe the behavior of costs relative to output, not the temporal nature of past irrecoverable expenditures, so this option misses the essence of the description.
Option d: Variable Cost. Variable costs vary with production volume (like materials). Similar to fixed costs, this term describes how costs behave with output, not whether they are past and unrecoverable.
Option e: Sunk Cost. This is the precise concept described: costs that have already been incurred in the past and cannot be recovered regardless of future decisions. They should not influence current decision-making because they remain the same no matter what happens next.

Retrospective (past) costs that have already been incurred and cannot be recovered.

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