Why are firms slow to adopt profitable business practices? Evidence on the roles of present bias, forgetfulness, and overconfidence about memory

Why are micro, small, and medium enterprises slow to adopt profitable business practices? We test the role of three behavioral biases: present bias, limited memory, and overconfidence about memory. In partnership with a payments financial technology (FinTech) provider in Mexico, we randomly offer businesses that are already users of the payments technology the opportunity to be charged a lower merchant fee for each payment they receive. We randomly vary whether the firms face a deadline to register for this lower fee, whether they receive a reminder, and whether the reminder is anticipated (i.e., whether we tell them in advance that they will receive a reminder on a certain date).