We do not find any strong support for the hypothesis that exposure to images of half-naked women impact economic preferences in men

This is somewhat disappointing. I was expecting some juicy findings. Candy was appreciated by men, though not significantly different from women. Pity, they did not do a study with stark naked women as the pictures are a little lame.

Undressed for Success? The Effects of Half-Naked Women on Economic Behavior

Abstract

Images of half-naked women are in many societies ubiquitous in advertising and popular culture. Yet relatively little is known about the potential impacts of such images on economic decision making. In this paper, we examine how exposure to images of half-naked women affect risk taking, willingness to compete and math performance. We perform a lab experiment with a total of 648 participants of both genders, randomly exposing participants to advertising images including either women in bikini or underwear, fully dressed women, or no women. Exposure to images of half-naked women could potentially have effects on economic preferences and performance through channels such as arousal, cognitive load and stereotyping. Following a pre-registered pre-analysis plan, we find no treatment effects on any of the outcome measures for female participants. For male participants, we also find no effect on willingness to compete or math performance, but suggestive evidence that men take more risk after having been exposed to images of half-naked women compared to images including no women. We thus do not find any strong support for the hypothesis that exposure to images of half-naked women impact economic preferences, but given the suggestive evidence for risk taking future studies should explore this further.

For men, the difference in math performance between the control group and T2 is very small and insignificant, yet the share of men competing increases by 9.8 percentage points.

Bonus trivia

B.4 Treatment effects on willingness to take candy

Figure B.3 illustrates the share of participants taking candy, by gender and treatment. Men are 4.0 percentage points more prone to take candy in T2 compared to C (42.7 % vs. 38.8 %), while women are 1.7 percentage points less prone to take candy. None of these differences are statistically significant.

Pdf here