Why Are Small Businesses Slow to Adopt Profitable Opportunities?

Why are small businesses often slow to adopt new profitable opportunities, even in the absence of informational frictions, fixed costs, or misaligned incentives? We explore three potential mechanisms: present bias, memory, and trust in other firms. In partnership with a financial technology (FinTech) payments provider in Mexico, we randomly offer businesses that already use the payments technology the opportunity to be charged a lower merchant fee for each payment they receive from customers. The median value of the fee reduction is 3% of profits. We randomly vary the size of the fee reduction, whether the businesses face a deadline to accept the offer, whether they receive a reminder, and whether we tell them in advance that they will receive a reminder. While deadlines do not affect take-up, reminders increase takeup of the lower fee by 18%, and anticipated reminders by an additional 7%. The results point to limited memory in firms, but not present bias. Additional survey data suggests trust as the mechanism behind the significant additional effect of the anticipated reminder. Upon receiving an anticipated reminder from the FinTech company, firms value the offer more and accept it even if they generally distrust advertised offers.