This research examines how credit card debt affects consumer spending. In five experimental and field studies, the authors demonstrate that outstanding credit card debt increases spending for consumers with high self-control. They also show that this effect can be eliminated by increasing the available credit on the credit card. Thus, when the available credit is low, consumers with greater sel...

Over the past fifteen years, U.S. households in the aggregate have devoted an increasing share of their after-tax income to the payment of financial obligations. Much of the increase is attributable to a rise in the level of credit card debt, which has raised the share of households’ aggregate after-tax income that is devoted to credit card payments. In turn, the rising share of credit card deb...

We apply Artificial Immune Systems(AIS) [4] for credit card fraud detection and we compare it to other methods such as Neural Nets(NN) [8] and Bayesian Nets(BN) [2], Naive Bayes(NB) and Decision Trees(DT) [13]. Exhaustive search and Genetic Algorithm(GA) [7] are used to select optimized parameters sets, which minimizes the fraud cost for a credit card database provided by a Brazilian card issue...

Outlier Detection has attracted substantial attention in many applications and research areas. Examples include detection of network intrusions or credit card fraud. Many of the existing approaches are based on pair-wise distances among all points in the dataset. These approaches cannot easily extend to current datasets that usually contain a mix of categorical and continuous attributes, and ma...

In this article, we investigate why merchants accept credit cards for payment despite the relatively high cost of processing these types of transactions. A two-period model is constructed to determine under what conditions a credit card equilibrium would exist. The results of the model indicate that when the cost of funds is not too high and when the merchant’s profit margin is sufficiently hig...

Although much research finds that “birds of a feather flock together,” the present research suggests that opposites tend to attract when it comes to certain spending tendencies. That is, “tightwads,” who generally spend less than they would ideally like to spend, and “spendthrifts,” who generally spend more than they would ideally like to spend, tend to marry each other, consistent with the not...

1.1 Overview of the US mortgage market Owner-occupied housing and the mortgages used to finance it are currently the single largest asset and liability on the household balance sheet. As shown in Graph 1, residential mortgage debt has grown so that households now owe just over $8 trillion. Consumer credit, which includes personal loans, auto loans and credit card balances, now stands at just ov...

With the ageing of the population, and increasing demand for individuals to be financially literate and self-sufficient, older Australians may find themselves at greater risk of fraud. Although the proportion of the elderly experiencing fraud is lower than for those aged less than 65 years, this is the crime they are most likely to experience and the effects can be devastating as the elderly ar...

This Article explores the relationship between consumer credit markets and bankruptcy policy. In general, I argue that the causative relationships running between borrowing and bankruptcy compel a new strategy for policing the conduct of lenders and borrowers in modern consumer credit markets. The strategy must be sensitive to the role of the credit card in lending markets and must recognize th...