The investee companies and comparison companies represented different
industries, as described in Table I. To enable better generalisability of the results
and more varied investee company-comparison company combinations, we
manipulated half of the respondents for each investee company to have one
comparison company, while the other half to have another comparison company.
As a limitation of the previous overall study design, the response data gathered
presents a potential retrospection bias. Yet, we consider the data to be adequately valid
for our theoretical purposes, for the following reasons. First, even if people’s