At a roundtable on decimalization last month at the SEC, many participants expressed support for a pilot even as some questioned whether varying tick sizes would yield more IPOs or research coverage.

Skeptics of varying tick sizes point out the benefits are unknown, while it’s clear the move to 1-cent increments lowered spreads and created savings for investors.

“We are arguing we need to provide more returns to the market makers -- not necessarily because we want to make market makers better off, but because we want them in turn to subsidize research,” Maureen O’Hara, a finance professor at Cornell University and chairman of Investment Technology Group Inc., said at the roundtable. “I think that linkage is really tenuous.”

Judith Burns, an SEC spokeswoman, declined to say how soon a tick-size pilot program would be approved.

A pilot program would probably move forward under the SEC’s next chairman. Mary Jo White, President Barack Obama’s nominee to lead the agency, told senators on March 12 that she was inclined to believe that one tick size “doesn’t necessarily fit all.”

“Clearly, it’s a priority to focus on that issue,” White said at her nomination hearing before the Senate Banking Committee.

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