Laypersons ("consumers") often have difficulty finding, understanding, and acting on health information due to gaps in their domain knowledge. Ideally, consumer health vocabularies (CHVs) would reflect the different ways consumers express and think about health topics, helping to bridge this vocabulary gap. However, despite the recent research on mismatches between consumer and professional lan...

The causes and ramifications of the rise in the consumer debt burden over time have been subject to much debate. This paper first offers a brief overview and analysis of the key economic variables used to evaluate consumer debt levels. The principal focus of the paper, however, is a broad review of the literature on the topic of consumer debt to provide a framework for how to assess recent cred...

Analyzing a new dataset of 110,000 consumer complaints lodged with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (the "CFPB" or the "Bureau"), the authors find that: (i) Bank of America, Citibank, and PNC Bank were significantly less timely in responding to consumer complaints than the average financial institution; (ii) consumers of some of the largest financial services providers, including Wells ...

The rapid growth of the consumer-to-consumer online auction market demands research into its market structure and future trends. We propose that online reputation is becoming an important indicator of online traders' business capacity in the auction market. Based on the data sampled from eBay.com, we find that seller reputation, rather than buyer reputation, is lognormally distributed. Followin...