We received the following call for submissions: The AALS Section on Financial Institutions and Consumer Financial Services invites submissions of no more than five pages for its session at the 2022 annual meeting of the AALS. Next year’s annual meeting will be held virtually from January 5-9, 2022, with the date and time of the […]
Author Archives: Jeff Sovern
by Jeff Sovern The report, by Syed Ejaz, is titled A Broken System: How The Credit Reporting System Fails Consumers And What To Do About It. Here are excerpts from the Executive Summary: Consumers are finding errors on their credit reports. More than one-third (34 percent) of consumers who participated in CR’s Credit Checkup survey […]
Oren Bar-Gill of Harvard and Omri Ben-Shahar of Chicago have written Manipulation by Mislaid Priorities. Here is the abstract: This paper lays a foundation for a new theory of manipulation, based on the misprioritization of (truthful) information. Since consumers review only a subset of all available information, firms can harm consumers by prioritizing information that maximizes […]
by Jeff Sovern The report is titled Where White Men Rule: How the Secretive System of Forced Arbitration Hurts Women and Minorities. CNBC has a story here. Here's an excerpt from the report: Arbitrators in consumer and employment cases are mostly male and overwhelmingly white. At AAA and JAMS, the two largest consumer and employment […]
Recently, the blog posted two items (here and here) arguing that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau should issue a rule barring the use of arbitration clauses unless consumers opt in to them. The second item was in reply to Mark Levin's blog post at Ballard Spahr's Consumer Finance Monitor blog response to our first blog […]
by Jeff Sovern Last week, I suggested that the CFPB adopt a new arbitration rule. Yesterday, Ballard Spahr's Mark Levin commented on my proposal, in a blog post titled Professor Sovern’s opt-in arbitration proposal is neither new nor supportable. This post responds to some of Mr. Levin's arguments. Mr. Levin wrote that my suggestion would […]
Here. Excerpt: * * With no announcement, the company recently changed its terms of service to allow customers to file lawsuits. Already, it faces at least three proposed class actions, including one brought May 18 alleging the company’s Alexa-powered Echo devices recorded people without permission. The retail giant made the change after plaintiffs’ lawyers flooded […]
Here, in an article by Kate Berry. The article is behind a paywall but should soon be available on Lexis if it isn't already.
Paolina C. Medina of Texas A&M University and Jose L. Negrin of the Banco de Mexico have written The Hidden Role of Contract Terms: Evidence from Credit Card Minimum Payments in Mexico, Management Science (2021). Here is the abstract: This paper argues that thresholds in financial contracts act as implicit nudges in consumers’ decisions. Exploiting […]
The American Economic Association has a report on the study here. The actual paper, Is No News (Perceived As) Bad News? An Experimental Investigation of Information Disclosure by Ginger Zhe Jin, Michael Luca, & Daniel Martin, is here. Here's the abstract: This paper uses laboratory experiments to directly test a central prediction of disclosure theory: that […]