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This paper identifies and discusses possible liquidity and credit scoring puzzles. Regarding liquidity, it is found that most account holders with a major credit card issuer have substantial unused liquidity on there credit cards at the time they borrow on payday loans. Their annual pecuniary losses from payday borrowing, compared to using their credit cards, are large compared to previously identified liquid debt puzzles. Regarding credit scores, payday lenders could obtain useful information about default probabilities by examining the FICO scores of applicants in addition to Teletrack scores, and credit card issuers would benefit from having frequently updated information about whether their account holders are payday borrowers. The authors conjecture that small costs could at least begin to explain these phenomena. Credit bureaus charge lenders small fees for each score query, and those fees might exceed the value of the marginal creditworthiness information obtained. On the consumer side, Zinman, Borzekowski, and Kiser discuss models of account-specific characteristics that can incorporate the realist variety of pecuniary, nonpecuniary, and cognitive costs.

This paper presents several new stylized facts on what people actually pay to use their checking and credit card accounts. The median household pays $500 per year and could avoid more than half these costs with minor changes in behavior. Translating these avoidable costs into consumption terms, most consumers could afford to borrow more than 1,000 additional dollars simply by allocating payment choices more efficiently. Penalty fees are economically important (representing about half of total fees, and the lion's share of checking account costs), and most penalty fees are easily avoidable by the paper's metrics. Interest and avoidable interest generally persist over time; in contrast, fee and avoidable fee costs are negatively correlated over time for many consumers. Tremendous heterogeneity is found on all margins of costs and cost persistence.

The recent financial crisis has led many to question how well businesses deliver services and how well regulatory institutions address problems in consumer financial markets. This paper discusses consumer financial regulation, emphasizing the full range of arguments for regulation that derive from market failure and from limited consumer rationality in financial decision making. We present three case studies—of mortgage markets, payday lending, and financing retirement consumption—to illustrate the need for, and limits of, regulation. We argue that if regulation is to be beneficial, it must be tailored to specific problems and must be accompanied by research to measure the effectiveness of regulatory interventions.

Perhaps no kind of regulation is more common or less useful than mandated disclosure-requiring one party to a transaction to give the other information. It is the iTunes terms you assent to, the doctor's consent form you sign, the pile of papers you get with your mortgage. Reading the terms, the form, and the papers is supposed to equip you to choose your purchase, your treatment, and your loan well.More Than You Wanted to Knowsurveys the evidence and finds that mandated disclosure rarely works. But how could it? Who reads these disclosures? Who understands them? Who uses them to make better choices? Omri Ben-Shahar and Carl Schneider put the regulatory problem in human terms. Most people find disclosures complex, obscure, and dull. Most people make choices by stripping information away, not layering it on. Most people find they can safely ignore most disclosures and that they lack the literacy to analyze them anyway. And so many disclosures are mandated that nobody could heed them all. Nor can all this be changed by simpler forms in plainer English, since complex things cannot be made simple by better writing. Furthermore, disclosure is a lawmakers' panacea, so they keep issuing new mandates and expanding old ones, often instead of taking on the hard work of writing regulations with bite. Timely and provocative,More Than You Wanted to Knowtakes on the form of regulation we encounter daily and asks why we must encounter it at all.

This study conducts a comprehensive exploration of the neurocognitive processes underlying consumer credit decision-making using cutting-edge techniques from neuroscience and machine learning (ML). Employing functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS), the research examines the hemodynamic responses of participants while evaluating diverse credit offers. The experimental phase of this study investigates the hemodynamic responses collected from 39 healthy participants with respect to different loan offers. This study integrates fNIRS data with advanced ML algorithms, specifically Extreme Gradient Boosting, CatBoost, Extra Tree Classifier, and Light Gradient Boosted Machine, to predict participants' credit decisions based on prefrontal cortex (PFC) activation patterns. Findings reveal distinctive PFC regions correlating with credit behaviors, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) associated with strategic decision-making, the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) linked to emotional valuations, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) reflecting brand integration and reward processing. Notably, the right dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) and the right vmPFC contribute to positive credit preferences. This interdisciplinary approach bridges neuroscience, machine learning and finance, offering unprecedented insights into the neural mechanisms guiding financial choices regarding different loan offers. The study's predictive model holds promise for refining financial services and illuminating human financial behavior within the burgeoning field of neurofinance. The work exemplifies the potential of interdisciplinary research to enhance our understanding of human financial decision-making.

Much evidence suggests that people are heterogeneous with regard to their abilities to make rational, forward-looking decisions. This raises the question as to when the rational types are decisive for aggregate outcomes and when the boundedly rational types shape aggregate results. We examine this question in the context of a long-standing and important economic problem: the adjustment of nominal prices after an anticipated monetary shock. Our experiments suggest that two types of bounded rationality--money illusion and anchoring--are important behavioral forces behind nominal inertia. However, depending on the strategic environment, bounded rationality has vastly different effects on aggregate price adjustment. If agents' actions are strategic substitutes, adjustment to the new equilibrium is extremely quick, whereas under strategic complementarity, adjustment is both very slow and associated with relatively large real effects. This adjustment difference is driven by price expectations, which are very flexible and forward-looking under substitutability but adaptive and sticky under complementarity. Moreover, subjects' expectations are also considerably more rational under substitutability.

In this challenging and innovative article, we propose a framework for the consumer behavior named \"consumer financial spinning\". It occurs when borrowers-consumers of products with high financial stakes accumulate unsustainable debt and disconnect from their initial financial hierarchy of needs, wealth-related goals, and preferences over their household portfolio of assets. Three behaviors characterize daredevil consumers as they spin their wheel of misfortune, which together form a dark financial triangle: overconfidence, use of rationed rationality, and deceitfulness. We provokingly adapt some of the tenets of the Markowitz and Capital Asset Pricing models in the context of the predatory paradigm that consumer financial spinning entails and use modeling principles from the data percolation methodology. We partially test the proposed framework and show under what realistic conditions the relationship between expected returns and risk may depart from linearity. Our analysis and results appear timely and important because a better understanding of the psychological conditions that fuel intense speculation may restrain market frictions, which historically have kept reappearing and are likely to reoccur on a regular basis.

The strategies that Russian and American banks use to evaluate the creditworthiness of prospective credit cardholders are compared. Drawing on Knight's theory of risk and uncertainty, the authors argue that uncertainty, inherent in any credit transaction, can only be reduced to measurable risk if there are institutions that create stability over time, categorize events properly, and allow for verification and accumulation of information.

Financialization challenges Karl Polanyi's thesis of double movement, the thesis that efforts to extend the market evoke efforts to protect humans, nature, and means of production from market forces. Financialization refers to the increased power of financial institutions. The government protects the incomes and assets of financial institutions, but it does little to protect the incomes and assets of households, which are necessary for people to afford healthcare, education, emergencies, retirement, and so on. Polanyi criticized nineteenth-century civilization for transforming land, labor, and the means of production into commodities, using economic insecurity to motivate humans. The development of intangible property allowed business to expand the market in two ways: (i) restricting output to drive up profits and (ii) liquefying consumer assets to provide credit to consumers to increase spending. The implications of that process manifested themselves in the financial crisis of 2008. Market capitalism represented the attempt to organize commodities based on economic rationality. Similarly, the twentieth- and twenty-first-century capitalism represents the effort to \"rationally\" organize society according to the value of intangible assets. Both efforts failed, indicating the continued relevance of Polanyi's thesis.