Because professionals lenders represent a costly subject pool (Libby et al. 2002), we chose to use master’s students to test our hypotheses. M.B.A. students have often been used in the past to proxy for nonprofessional investors and, while this design choice has been subject to criticism, Elliott et al. (2007) provide evidence that using M.B.A. students to proxy for nonprofessional investors is a valid methodological choice, provided researchers match a task’s integrative
complexity with the appropriate level of M.B.A. student. In a similar vein, we argue that our M.B.A. students, with their significant full-time work experience and completed coursework, are a reasonable proxy for many of the lenders who will be affected by the proposed leasing standard (e.g., nonprofessional investors in the bond market, lenders at local community banks, and other small business commercial lenders). We return to this issue of our experimental design again in the conclusion when we discuss some of the limitations of our study.