“…To date, there have been only a handful of empirical studies that have touched upon the relationship between goals and escalation (e.g., Conlon & Garland, ; Kernan & Lord, ; Lee, Keil, & Kasi, ; Ting, ), and they have drawn on two different theoretical perspectives, namely the goal‐gradient hypothesis (Hull, ) and control theory (Campion & Lord, ; Powers, ). The goal‐gradient hypothesis states that “the tendency to approach a goal increases with proximity to the goal” (Kivetz, Urminsky, & Zheng, , p. 39).…”