The article's title is "Showing off your status and wealth makes you seem less co-operative", and the title here on HN is absolutely wrong. I like wearing flashy clothes myself, and I would even say it has proven advantageous to cooperation in my line of work, so I was curious about this article. However, nowhere is it stated that flashy clothes make people less likely to cooperate with you. They say wearing clothes…
It sent a pretty strong signal to us that their margins and commissions had a lot of room to negotiate down. I suspect we negotiated harder with this organization than we would have otherwise, looked for opportunities to reduce usage, and so on. Not solely because of the wealthy display, but I'm sure it played some part.