the collateral channel how real estate shocks affect corporate investment abstract what is the impact of real estate prices on corporate investment in the presence of financing frictions firms use pledgeable assets as collateral to finance new projects through this collateral channel shocks to the value of real estate can have a large impact on aggregate investment to compute the sensitivity of investment to collateral value we use local variations in real estate prices as shocks to the collateral value of firms that own real estate over the 1993 2007 period the representative us corporation invests 0 06 out of each 1 of collateral jel d22 g31 r30

licensing effect in consumer choice abstract most choices in the real world follow other choices or judgments the authors show that a prior choice which activates and boosts a positive self concept subsequently licenses the choice of a more self indulgent option the authors propose that licensing can operate by committing to a virtuous act in a preceding choice which reduces negative self attributions associated with the purchase of relative luxuries five studies demonstrate the proposed licensing effect of a prior commitment to a virtuous act on subsequent choice consistent with the authors theory the preference for an indulgent option diminishes if the licensing task is attributed to an external motivation the authors also report a mediation analysis in support of their theoretical explanation that the licensing effect operates by providing a temporary boost in the relevant self concept

are women more attracted to co operation than men we conduct a real effort experiment where participants choose between individual compensation and team based pay in contrast to tournaments we find that women choose team based pay at least as frequently as men in all our conditions and significantly more often in a well defined subset of conditions women s greater attraction to co operative incentives results in part from their more optimistic assessments of their prospective teammate s ability women also respond differently to alternative rules for team formation in a manner that is consistent with advantageous inequity aversion in contrast men show a greater responsiveness to efficiency gains associated with team production

from inherent value to incentive value when and why pointless effort enhances consumer preference companies typically use clear fonts and bright pictures in their ads web sites and product package designs place their products on easy to reach shelves and emphasize ease of usage to make their products appear desirable to consumers however we suggest that customers focused on incentive value getting the best product may instead see products associated with noninstrumental pointless effort as more desirable we suggest that because effort is usually required to get the best outcomes people looking for the best outcomes also mistakenly presume effort must imply the best possible outcome across five studies we show that highlighting incentive value for instance by message framing or by measuring chronic focus or by manipulating situational focus on incentive value enhances preference toward outcomes associated with noninstrumental effort we discuss the importance of our findings for understanding everyday consumption decisions and argue for a widespread tendency among individuals wanting the best to infer value from noninstrumental effort

consumer preference for a no choice option the traditional focus in the decision making literature has been on understanding how consumers choose among a given set of alternatives the notion that preference uncertainty may lead to choice deferral when no single alternative has a decisive advantage is tested in seven studies building on recent research the article shows that the decision to defer choice is influenced by the absolute difference in attractiveness among the alternatives provided and is not consistent with trade off difficulty or the theory of search these findings are then extended to show that choice deferral can also be modified for the same alternatives by manipulations that make them appear more similar in attractiveness or that decrease the need to differentiate among them the results are consistent with the notion that preference uncertainty results in a hesitation to commit to any single action since small differences in attractiveness among the alternatives are potentially reversible consistent with this premise the effect of attractiveness difference on choice deferral decreased significantly when subjects were first allowed to practice making monetary trade offs among the available alternatives

incrementality of sme loan guarantees in many countries loan guarantee programs are important elements of government policy with respect to small and medium sized enterprises smes if loan guarantee schemes are to be effective a majority of firms obtaining assistance through such a scheme ought not to be able to obtain financing from existing sources a property known as incrementality or additionality this paper describes a new approach to measuring incrementality this work uses a two stage process to estimate the incrementality of loans made under the terms of the canada small business financing csbf program first a logistic regression based model of loan outcomes essentially a credit scoring model is estimated based on a large representative sample of smes the resulting model was consistent with prior expectations and exhibited high levels of goodness of fit the model was then employed to classify a sample of firms that had received loans under the terms of the loan guarantee scheme incremental loans ought to be classified as turndowns by the model hence the proportion of loan guarantee recipients that the model classified as turndowns is a direct measure of incrementality for the csbf loan guarantee program incrementality was estimated with 95 confidence as 74 8 9 0

effect of credit guarantee policy on survival and performance of smes in republic of korea this study evaluates the effect of credit guarantee on smes at the firm level to estimate the effect of credit guarantee we analyze relations between credit guarantee the survival of guaranteed firms and their productive performance the result indicates that credit guarantee frequency enabled guaranteed firms to achieve good performances in general on the contrary the effect of guarantee amounts is ambiguous in that there is difference between the contemporary effect and the lagged effect therefore we conclude that credit guarantee satisfied partially its goal to alleviate smes difficulty in acquiring finance and to stabilize employment

cooperation and competition in intergenerational experiments in the field and the laboratory there is economic pressure towards the postponement of the retirement age but employers are still reluctant to employ older workers we investigate the comparative behavior of juniors and seniors in experiments conducted both onsite with the employees of two large firms and in a conventional laboratory environment with students and retirees we show that seniors are no more risk averse than juniors and are typically more cooperative both juniors and working seniors respond strongly to competition the implication is that it may be beneficial to define additional incentives near the end of the career to motivate and retain older workers

when more is less and less is more the role of ideal point availability and assortment in consumer choice contrary to the common wisdom that more choice is always better selections made from large assortments can lead to weaker preferences building on the extant literature this research identifies ideal point availability as a key factor moderating the impact of assortment on choice it is proposed that in the case of large assortments ideal point availability can simplify choice leading to a stronger preference for the selected alternative in contrast for choices made from smaller assortments ideal point availability is proposed to have the opposite effect leading to weaker preferences data obtained from four experiments lend support for the theory and the empirical predictions advanced in this article

gender and competition at a young age gender gaps may be observed in a variety of economic and social environments one of the possible determining factors is that men are more competitive than women and so when the competitiveness of the environment increases the performance of men increases relative to that of women we test this hypothesis in a field study conducted with 9 year old children running on a track they first run alone and then in pairs over a short distance with different gender composition of the pairs the results support the hypothesis that performance in competition varies according to gender when children ran alone there was no difference in performance in competition boys but not girls improved their performance this finding relates to the discussion regarding single sex schools the outcomes of examinations in a mixed sex school can show a gender gap in favor of boys even when this gap does not reflect actual abilities girls who are as talented as boys will end up performing worse just because they are not as competitive and will not achieve as high scores in examinations as boys

constructive consumer choice processes consumer decision making has been a focal interest in consumer research and consideration of current marketplace trends e g technological change an information explosion indicates that this topic will continue to be critically important we argue that consumer choice is inherently constructive due to limited processing capacity consumers often do not have well defined existing preferences but construct them using a variety of strategies contingent on task demands after describing constructive choice consumer decision tasks and decision strategies we provide an integrative framework for understanding constructive choice review evidence for constructive consumer choice in light of that framework and identify knowledge gaps that suggest opportunities for additional research

market boundaries and product choice illustrating attraction and substitution effects what happens to the share of choices each item receives when the choice set boundaries are extended by adding a new item that is extremely good on one dimension but poor on the others first there is a substitution effect whereby the new item takes choice share mainly from similar items in the set second there is an attraction effect resulting in a general shift of preference toward the added item experimental studies show that choice patterns conflict with current theoretical and common sense ideas about the effect of added alternatives on choice

do women shy away from competition do men compete too much we examine whether men and women of the same ability differ in their selection into a competitive environment participants in a laboratory experiment solve a real task first under a noncompetitive piece rate and then a competitive tournament incentive scheme although there are no gender differences in performance men select the tournament twice as much as women when choosing their compensation scheme for the next performance while 73 percent of the men select the tournament only 35 percent of the women make this choice this gender gap in tournament entry is not explained by performance and factors such as risk and feedback aversion only playa negligible role instead the tournament entry gap is driven by men being more overconfident and by gender differences in preferences for performing in a competition the result is that women shy away from competition and men embrace it

adding asymmetrically dominated alternatives violations of regularity and the similarity hypothesis an asymmetrically dominated alternative is dominated by one item in the set but not by another adding such an alternative to a choice set can increase the probability of choosing the item that dominates it this result points to the inadequacy of many current choice models and suggests product line strategies that might not otherwise be intuitively plausible

evaluating the impact of investment incentives the case of italy s law 488 1992 abstract italy s law 488 1992 allows firms willing to invest in lagging areas to receive a public subsidy by comparing subsidized firms with firms with rejected applications this paper evaluates whether the program made investments possible that otherwise would not have been made we find evidence that financed firms brought forward investment projects originally planned for the post intervention period to take advantage of the incentives we also find some support that subsidized firms may have taken some of the investment opportunities that unsubsidized firms would have exploited in the absence of incentives

house prices collateral and self employment this paper explores the role of the collateral lending channel to facilitate small business starts and self employment in the period before the financial crisis of 2008 we document that between 2002 and 2007 areas with a bigger run up in house prices experienced a strong increase in employment in small businesses compared to employment in large firms in the same industries this increase in small business employment was particularly pronounced in industries that need little startup capital and can thus more easily be financed out of increases in housing as collateral our results highlight the importance of the collateral lending channel during the period of the house price boom in the creation of small establishments we show that this effect is separate from the aggregate demand channel that relies on home equity based borrowing leading to increased demand and employment creation

price induced patterns of competition this research focuses on how price changes influence the observed pattern of brand competition the paper begins with a basic utility model formulation and examines the implications of three major classes of preference distributions on the expected patterns of competition a price tier model is proposed to operationalize the theory and to allow predictive testing the price tier model is estimated on 28 brands across four product categories the results show a specific asymmetric pattern of price competition higher price higher quality brands steal share from other brands in the same price quality tier as well as from brands in the tier below however lower price lower quality brands take sales from their own tier and the tier below brands but do not steal significant share from the tiers above the results are consistent with a bimodal preference distribution with the regular price indifference point being located toward the lower quality end of the preference distribution for the categories analyzed

the role of explanations and need for uniqueness in consumer decision making unconventional choices based on reasons this research investigates the interaction between a very common task explaining decisions and an individual difference need for uniqueness nfu on buyer decision making we propose that explaining or providing reasons for decisions shifts the focus from the choice of options to the choice of reasons furthermore buyers who explain their decisions and have high nfu tend to select unconventional reasons and are consequently more likely to make unconventional choices these predictions were supported in a series of studies involving choices between conventional and less conventional options such as whether to switch to a brand on sale whether to select a compromise option and whether to accept a gamble with a possible loss the findings also indicate that the effects of providing reasons are not due to attempts to act rationally or to concerns about being evaluated three boundary conditions on the generalization that high nfu consumers who provide reasons tend to make unconventional choices we

are results from non hypothetical choice based conjoint analyses and non hypothetical recoded ranking conjoint analyses similar conflicting findings have been found in previous research that compared choice based conjoint analysis and ranking conjoint analysis in a public good setting the present paper revisits this issue for a private good in a non hypothetical context using small and large choice sets our results suggest that in a small choice set setting participants preferences and willingness to pay are similar across the two conjoint analysis formats however in large choice sets a divergence between the two conjoint analysis formats emerges hence the two conjoint analysis formats can only be used interchangeably in small choice sets not in large choice sets

an empirical analysis of latitude of price acceptance in consumer package goods scanner panel data analyses for sweetened and unsweetened drink categories with four brands in each support the presence of a region of price insensitivity around a reference price the analyses also suggest that consumers with higher average reference price have a wider latitude of price acceptance consumers with a higher frequency of purchase i e shorter average interpurchase time interval are found to have a narrower latitude of price acceptance because they are more aware of the range of price distributions finally consumers with a higher average brand loyalty have a wider latitude of price acceptance demonstrating greater tolerance of price fluctuations

the effect of forced choice on choice abstract whereas most academic and industry studies of consumer preferences and decision making involve forced choice i e participants are told to choose one of the presented product or service alternatives buyers usually also have the option not to select any alternative an implicit assumption in the experimental practice of forcing choice is that the no choice option draws proportionately from the various available alternatives such that the qualitative conclusions are unaffected however the authors propose that the no choice option competes most directly with alternatives that buyers tend to select when they are uncertain about their preferences building on this general proposition the authors show that the introduction of the no choice option strengthens the attraction effect weakens the compromise effect and decreases the relative share of an option that is average on all dimensions they also examine the mechanisms underlying the impact of having the option not to choose and the condi

self control for the righteous toward a theory of precommitment to indulgence prior research has examined consumers use of self control to avoid hedonic myopic temptations such as overspending and smoking in this research we investigate the opposite form of self control whereby consumers force themselves to indulge and avoid default forms of spending on utilitarian necessities and or savings in particular consumers who have difficulty choosing items that are perceived as indulgences or luxuries e g a cruise over necessities e g saving for college education and cash in everyday decisions may use precommitments to indulgence especially when the psychological cost of such commitments is less concrete these propositions were tested in a series of studies involving real and hypothetical choices as well as process measures the results indicate that a substantial segment of consumers choose hedonic luxury rewards over cash of equal or greater value consumers typically explain such choices based on the need to precommit to indulgence to make sure that the award does no

the economics of product variety a survey demand for variety may arise from a taste for diversity in individual consumption and or from diversity in tastes even when each consumer chooses a single variant the full degree of variety potentially demanded will not in general be supplied because scale economies even to a small degree mean that the potential welfare or revenue gain from greater variety must be balanced against the lower unit production costs with fewer variants the economics of product variety consists essentially in analysing the effect of this balance in different situations and comparing the degree of product variety for different market structures with each other and with the optimum the survey commences with the work on market structures with single product firms generalized monopolistic competition tracing modern developments in both the chamberlinian and hotelling traditions the latter has been particularly fruitful due to the expansion of the original locational ideas into virtual spaces in product characteristics the emphasis in recent work on product variety has been on multiproduct firms in both monopolistic and oligopolistic structures including strategic market preemption although most work has been in a full information context there have been advances in product variety under imperfect information either by consumers to properties of the firms products or firms as to consumers demands

changing levels or changing slopes the narrowing of the gender earnings gap 1959 1999 once educational attainment and other observable characteristics have been controlled for studies show that the gender wage gap among adult full time workers is about half the size it was in 1980

gender differences in examination behavior a unique examination strategy in first year microeconomics courses is used to test for gender differences in examination behavior students have the possibility of attaining a seminar bonus on the final exam for near perfect seminar attendance and are given two voluntary initial quizzes during the semester at the final exam the scores received on initial quizzes can either be accepted as is or students can attempt to improve their marks by answering similar quiz questions on the exam results suggest that female students are more likely to take initial quizzes and receive a seminar bonus but are less likely to re take quiz questions on the final exam these results suggest higher risk aversion less overconfidence and more self discipline or less procrastination among female students relative to male students our estimated behavioral differences may have important implications in terms of final grades on the course jel i21 j16 a12 a14

the red and the black mental accounting of savings and debt in the standard economic account of consumer behavior the cost of a purchase takes the form of a reduction in future utility when expenditures that otherwise could have been made are forgone the reality of consumer hedonics is different when people make purchases they often experience an immediate pain of paying which can undermine the pleasure derived from consumption the ticking of the taxi meter for example reduces one s pleasure from the ride we propose a double entry mental accounting theory that describes the nature of these reciprocal interactions between the pleasure of consumption and the pain of paying and draws out their implications for consumer behavior and hedonics a central assumption of the model which we call prospective accounting is that consumption that has already been paid for can be enjoyed as if it were free and that the pain associated with payments made prior to consumption but not after is buffered by thoughts of the benefits that the payments will finance another important concept is coupling which refers to the degree to which consumption calls to mind thoughts of payment and vice versa some financing methods such as credit cards tend to weaken coupling whereas others such as cash payment produce tight coupling our model makes a variety of predictions that are at variance with economic formulations contrary to the standard prediction that people will finance purchases to minimize the present value of payments our model predicts strong debt aversion that they should prefer to prepay for consumption or to get paid for work after it is performed such pay before sequences confer hedonic benefits because consumption can be enjoyed without thinking about the need to pay for it in the future likewise when paying beforehand the pain of paying is mitigated by thoughts of future consumption benefits contrary to the economic prediction that consumers should prefer to pay at the margin for what they consume our model predicts that consumers will find it less painful to pay for and hence will prefer flat rate pricing schemes such as unlimited internet access at a fixed monthly price even if it involves paying more for the same usage other predictions concern spending patterns with cash charge or credit cards and preferences for the earmarking of purchases we test these predictions in a series of surveys and in a conjoint like analysis that pitted our double entry mental accounting model against a standard discounting formulation and another benchmark that did not incorporate hedonic interactions between consumption and payments our model provides a better fit of the data for 60 of the subjects the discounting formulation provides a better fit for only 29 of the subjects even when allowing for positive and negative discount rates the pain of paying we argue plays an important role in consumer self regulation but is hedonically costly from a hedonic perspective the ideal situation is one in which payments are tightly coupled to consumption so that paying evokes thoughts about the benefits being financed but consumption is decoupled from payments so that consumption does not evoke thoughts about payment from an efficiency perspective however it is important for consumers to be aware of what they are paying for consumption this creates a tension between hedonic efficiency and what we call decision efficiency various institutional arrangements such as financing of public parks through taxes or usage fees play into this tradeoff a producer developing a pricing structure for their product or service should be aware of these two conflicting objectives and should try to devise a structure that reconciles them

choice based on reasons the case of attraction and compromise effects building on previous research this article proposes that choice behavior under preference uncertainty may be easier to explain by assuming that consumers select the alternative supported by the best reasons this approach provides an explanation for the so called attraction effect and leads to the prediction of a compromise effect consistent with the hypotheses the results indicate that 1 brands tend to gain share when they become compromise alternatives in a choice set 2 attraction and compromise effects tend to be stronger among subjects who expect to justify their decisions to others and 3 selections of dominating and compromise brands are associated with more elaborate and difficult decisions

do liquidity constraints matter in explaining firm size and growth some evidence from the italian manufacturing industry the paper investigates whether liquidity constraints affect firm size and growth dynamics using a large longitudinal sample of italian manufacturing firms we run standard panel data gibrat regressions suitably expanded to take into account liquidity constraints proxied by cash flow scaled by firm sales moreover we characterize the statistical properties of fi rms size growth age and scaled cashflow distributions pooled data show that i liquidity constraints engender a negative statistically significant effect on growth once one controls for size ii smaller firms grow more and experience more volatile growth patterns after controlling for liquidity constraints iii the stronger liquidity constraints the more size negatively affects firm growth we find that pooled size distributions depart from log normality and growth rates are well approximated by fat tailed tent shaped laplace densities we also study the evolution of growth size distributions over time our exercises suggest that the strong negative impact of liquidity constraints on firm growth which was present in the pooled sample becomes ambiguous when one disaggregates across years finally firms who were young and strongly liquidity constrained at the beginning of the sample period grew persistently more than those who were old and weakly liquidity constrained

yes but this other one looks better works better how do consumers respond to trade offs between sustainability and other valued attributes consumers are increasingly facing product evaluation and choice situations that include information about product sustainability i e information about a product s relative environmental and social impact in many cases consumers have to make decisions that involve a trade off between product sustainability and other valued product attributes similarly product and marketing managers need to make decisions that reflect how consumers will respond to different trade off scenarios in the current research we study consumer responses across two different possible trade off scenarios one in which consumers face a trade off between product sustainability and hedonic value and another in which they must trade off between product sustainability and utilitarian value our results suggest that overall consumers are more likely to trade off hedonic value e g esthetics for sustainability than to trade off utilitarian value e g functional performance for sustainability in studies 1a and 1b we presented participants with a product choice task and also measured their anticipatory emotions as they contemplated their options the results suggest that given a trade off consumers are more likely to choose a sustainable product when they have to trade off hedonic value than when they have to trade off utilitarian value further these studies provide some insight into the emotions underlying this effect in study 2 we use a different consumer response measure relative purchase likelihood and investigate the effect of trade off type across categories that vary in the degree to which hedonic and utilitarian attributes are perceived to be important referred to as product type our results suggest that the effect of trade off type still holds yet is moderated by product type such that consumers greater willingness to trade off hedonic value vs utilitarian value for sustainability is attenuated as the relative importance of hedonic vs utilitarian attributes increases in addition to building on our theoretical understanding of decision making given trade offs with moral attributes this research is also intended to support managers as they define and choose among various strategic product development and marketing promotion options

the state street mile age and gender differences in competition aversion in the field i introduction gender differences in competitiveness are hypothesized to play a role in a wide array of economic outcomes including the low representation of women among fortune 500 chief executive officers bertrand and hallock 2001 niederle and vesterlund 2007 although psychologists have a long history of documenting the reluctance of girls or women to enter competitions economists have begun to study this phenomenon only recently psychologists have previously emphasized the tendency of women to underestimate their future performance on a number of different tasks deaux 1979 pallier 2003 1 careful experimental studies by economists reveal that in a laboratory setting a number of different reasons underlie women s lower inclination to compete these reasons include not only women s tendency to underestimate their own ability but also greater aversion to risk and uncertainty about their ability eckel 2008 eckel and grossman 2008 gupta poulsen and villeval 2011 niederle and yestrumskas 2008 niederle and vesterlund 2007 control for these and other factors in a carefully designed experiment that provides strong evidence of a distinct preference to avoid the act of competition against men 2 the purpose of this paper is to provide evidence of competition aversion in a natural setting somewhere between the simplicity of a laboratory experiment and the full complexity and ambiguity of a labor market the behavior of runners in a race suggests that female competition aversion can be detected even in single sex situations the state street mile race offers both male and female participants a choice between two different levels of competition those who believe they have superior ability relative to participants of the same gender are encouraged to enter a highly competitive high profile elite race with cash prizes other participants those who believe they are slower runners and those who simply prefer a lower level of competition pay the same entry fee and run the same course in age group races with no cash prize systematic gender differences are observed in the relationship between true ability as measured by actual time to run the mile observed ex post and the decision to enter the more competitive elite race while fast young men are almost certain to enter the highly competitive race a sizable minority of the fast young women do not choose to do so niederle and vesterlund 2007 argue that reluctance to compete against men is particularly costly to high ability women because this group has the most to gain from entering the competition this was true for the mixed gender tournament they studied however we find that on this single sex task the very fastest women are quite likely to enter the elite race it is the middle range above the qualifying standard but below the group most likely to win where the largest gender differences in behavior are observed thus although our results are consistent with experimental work suggesting that women tend to have competition averse preferences they also demonstrate that in some instances there might not be very much economic significance in this context the fastest women respond to financial incentives and the economic consequences of the preference for competition aversion are therefore quite small in addition to the gender difference this analysis identifies a reluctance of older qualified runners to enter the more competitive race despite the fact that over the age of 40 winners are chosen based on age graded times this finding differs from recent experimental work by charness and villeval 2009 which shows that younger and older field subjects employees below 30 years old and employees of the same firm above 50 years old were equally willing to select a competitive payment option in the state street mile the propensity to compete in the highly competitive elite race among older men is similar to that observed for younger women while older women are the least likely and young men are the most likely to enter a highly competitive elite race

variety vice and virtue how assortment size influences option choice assortment size has been shown to influence whether consumers make a choice but could it also influence what they choose five studies demonstrate that because choosing from larger assortments is often more difficult it leads people to select options that are easier to justify virtues and utilitarian necessities are generally easier to justify than indulgences consequently choosing from larger assortments often shifts choice from vices to virtues and from hedonic to utilitarian options these effects reverse however when situational factors provide accessible reasons to indulge underscoring the role of justification implications for choice difficulty and justification processes are discussed

the discriminating consumer product proliferation and willingness to pay for quality abstract the authors propose that a crowded product space motivates consumers to better discriminate between options of different quality specifically this article reports evidence from three controlled experiments and one natural experiment that people are prepared to pay more for high quality products and less for low quality products when they are considered in the context of a dense as opposed to a sparse set of alternatives to explain this effect the authors argue that consumers uncertain about the importance of quality learn from observing market outcomes product proliferation reveals that other consumers care to discriminate among similar alternatives and in turn this inference raises the importance of quality in decision making

intergenerational attitudes towards strategic uncertainty and competition a field experiment in a swiss bank with a market entry game inspired by camerer and lovallo 1999 we study the attitudes of junior and senior employees towards strategic uncertainty and competition seniors exhibit higher entry rates compared to juniors especially when the market capacity is not too low or when earnings from entry depend on relative performance this difference persists after controlling for attitudes towards non strategic uncertainty and for beliefs on others competitiveness and on relative ability seniors are more willing to compete when they predict a higher number of competitors this contradicts the stereotype of less competitive older employees

asymmetric decoy effects on lower quality versus higher quality brands meta analytic and experimental evidence prior research demonstrates that adding decoys to choice sets can increase choice shares of brands similar to decoys while reducing shares of brands dissimilar to decoys such effects have been dubbed attraction effects and violate the principles of independence of irrelevant alternatives ha and regularity we report a meta analysis that in addition to revealing heretofore unsupported range effects demonstrates an effect of brand quality decoys reduce shares of lower quality competitors more than they reduce shares of higher quality competitors moreover whereas iia is violated throughout regularity is violated only when higher quality brands are targeted decoys increase shares of higher quality brands but typically do not increase shares of lower quality brands to assess the generalizability of the meta analytic pattern we tested decoy effects on two distinct populations in a large experiment the more traditional population replicated the meta analytic pattern standard asymmetry while the more nontraditional population reversed it these findings suggest that while the standard asymmetry is replicable it may not generalize to all market segments

causal effect of credit guarantees for small and medium sized enterprises evidence from italy we evaluate the effectiveness of a partial credit guarantee program implemented in a large italian region that aimed to improve the access to credit of small and medium enterprises using unique microdata from a broad set of firms we show that the policy increased the long term loans for beneficiary firms while the total volume of bank loans was unaffected furthermore targeted firms benefited from a substantial decrease in interest rates however there is some evidence that firms are more likely to default as a consequence of the treatment conversely the results do not point to any significant effect on investments