The High-end Bias - An irrational preference of decision makers for high-end over low-end innovations.

Managerial decision-making idiosyncrasies continue to be pressing issues for academia and practice. Building on implicit attitude and evolutionary psychology theory, we hypothesize that decision makers implicitly prefer high-end over low-end innovation projects and that these implicitly held attitudes affect investment decisions. We also argue that firms introduce more high-end than low-end products despite no clear, objective advantage for high-end products. Two experiments and secondary data from consumer packaged goods provide substantial evidence for these hypotheses and thus the existence of a high-end innovation bias. This research extends the existing literature showing that implicit attitudes not only cause discrimination against people but also against project ideas and products, which has negative effects for low-end consumers and firms.