Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all sectors of the economy and society. To understand the impact of the pandemic on rms in China and suggest responding public policies, we investigated rms in Guangdong Province (a Province with the highest Gross Domestic Product in China). Methods: The survey sample included 524 rms in 15 cities in Guangdong Province. We chose these rms from list published by the government, considering the industrial characteristics of Guangdong province and rm size. The questionnaire comprised of four categories and included 17 questions was developed based on previous studies carried out by OECD. The executives of rms were contacted by phone or WeChat, and were invited to answer self-administered questionnaires through an on-line survey platform. The data was analyzed by SPSS. Results: The following ndings are worth to be noticed: (1) 48.7% of rms maintained stability, and 35.1% of the rms experienced a halt in operation or faced closure; (2) Nearly 70%-90% of the rms are or are willing to transform to online marketing, remote o ce work, and digital operations. (3) 46% of rms believe that there will be a certain loss this year, and 83.5% expected a decreasing trend of the city's GDP growth. Conclusions: rms in Guangdong Province have faced great challenges in the epidemic. The rms' production and operation activities are limited, and risks are faced. It is necessary to effectively implement supporting policies to profoundly lower production costs for rms, and help rms survive the di cult period, and even gradually transit to normal business operation status. Background The current COVID-19 is a rapidly evolving global challenge and like any pandemic, it weakens health systems, costs lives, and also poses great risks to the global economy and security [1, 2, 3, 4]. According to the data from WHO (World Health Organization) and Johns Hopkins University, till the middle of June 2020, the global COVID-19 pandemic has con rmed more than 7.5 million cases, causing nearly 420 thousand deaths in around 215 countries (https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html). COVID-19 pandemic is a public health emergency. It's a sudden outbreak that causes or is likely to cause serious public health damages including major infectious diseases, mass unexplained diseases, major food and occupational poisonings or other serious public health issues [5]. Global economic growth is expected to decrease continually on account of the epidemic impact throughout the world [6, 7]. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)'s forecast, the global GDP (Gross Domestic Product) growth rate will drop to 2.4% in 2020 [3]. The current continuous worldwide spread of COVID-19 has greatly increased the risk of uncertainty and global recession [8, 9][1]. Supply chain disruption, shrinking demand for consumption and investment, signi cant weakening of economic activities, and damaged market con dence have put more severe tests on the resilience of relevant economies, the level of...

When people seek to impress others, they often do so by highlighting individual achievements. Despite the intuitive appeal of this strategy, we demonstrate that people often prefer potential rather than achievement when evaluating others. Indeed, compared with references to achievement (e.g., "this person has won an award for his work"), references to potential (e.g., "this person could win an award for his work") appear to stimulate greater interest and processing, which can translate into more favorable reactions. This tendency creates a phenomenon whereby the potential to be good at something can be preferred over actually being good at that very same thing. We document this preference for potential in laboratory and field experiments, using targets ranging from athletes to comedians to graduate school applicants and measures ranging from salary allocations to online ad clicks to admission decisions.

Consumer choice is often based on the relative visual appeal of competing products. Lay intuition, common marketing practice, and extant literature all suggest that more visual impressions help consumers distinguish products. This research shows that the opposite can occur. Rather than highlighting differences, seeing more pictures of products being compared can obfuscate perceptions, reduce distinctiveness and attractiveness of products, and increase choice uncertainty. Six experiments demonstrate that this "product-agnosia" effect is driven by shifts in the perceptual focus level of visual information processing. More visual impressions increased component-oriented and decreased gestalt-oriented perceptual focus, which undermined the distinctiveness of products distinguished on a gestalt level (e.g., by style). The effect reversed for products distinguished on a component level (e.g., by technical features). Overall, the efficacy of "showing more" depended on matching consumers' visual-processing style and the level (gestalt vs. component) at which products are differentiated.

Understanding how human populations naturally respond to and cope with risk is important for fields ranging from psychology to public health. We used geophysical and individual-level mobile-phone data (mobile-apps, telecommunications, and Web usage) of 157,358 victims of the 2013 Ya’an earthquake to diagnose the effects of the disaster and investigate how experiencing real risk (at different levels of intensity) changes behavior. Rather than limiting human activity, higher earthquake intensity resulted in graded increases in usage of communications apps (e.g., social networking, messaging), functional apps (e.g., informational tools), and hedonic apps (e.g., music, videos, games). Combining mobile data with a field survey (N = 2,000) completed 1 week after the earthquake, we use an instrumental-variable approach to show that only increases in hedonic behavior reduced perceived risk. Thus, hedonic behavior could potentially serve as a population-scale coping and recovery strategy that is often missing in risk management and policy considerations.

We show that the way decision makers construct risk perceptions is systematically influenced by their level of self-control: low self-control results in greater weighting of probability and reduced weighting of consequences of negative outcomes in formulating overall threat perceptions. Seven studies demonstrate such distorted risk construction in wide-ranging risk domains. The effects hold for both chronic and manipulated levels of perceived self-control and are observed only for risks involving high personalagency (e.g., overeating, smoking, drinking). As an important implication of our results, we also demonstrate that those lower (higher) in self-control show relatively less (more) interest in products and lifestyle changes reducing consequences (e.g., a pill that heals liver damage from drinking) than those reducing likelihood of risks (e.g., a pill that prevents liver damage from drinking). We also explore several possible underlying processes for the observed effect and discuss the theoretical and managerial relevance of our findings.