Consumer Finance Working Group

The Foundation’s Consumer Finance Working Group conducts behavioral research on consumer financial decision making and explores its implications for regulating retail financial products such as mortgages, credit cards and annuities. Co-funded with the Sloan Foundation, the group also brings together leading social scientists and policymakers to examine innovative regulatory designs and strategies.

Research

Journal of Marketing Research

Special Issue

The Journal of Marketing Research released a RSF-funded special issue in November that presents new research on the problems consumers encounter when making financial decisions and how they can be helped to do better.

Consumer Finance Protection

Online Feature

The Russell Sage Foundation asked some of its leading experts to answer the question, "What should the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau do?"

Reports

Behavioral Economics and Marketing in Aid of Decision Making Among the Poor

This article considers several aspects of the economic decision making of the poor from the perspective of behavioral economics, and it focuses on potential contributions from marketing. Among other things, the authors consider some relevant facets of the social and institutional environments in which the poor interact, and they review some behavioral patterns that are likely to arise in these contexts. [...]

Small Grants in Behavioral Economics and Consumer Finance

The Russell Sage and Sloan Foundations have established a new small grants program to support young investigators interested in undertaking research on the financial decisions posed to consumers by increasingly complex retail financial products. The proposed research must address a topic in consumer finance using the theory and/or methods of behavioral economics. There are no limitations on the disciplinary background of the principal investigator and interdisciplinary efforts are welcome.

Working Group Members
	Thomas Baker, University of Pennsylvania Law School	Michael Barr, University of Michigan Law School
	Shlomo Benartzi, Anderson School of Management, UCLA	B. Douglas Bernheim, Stanford University
	Markus K. Brunnermeier, Princeton University	John Campbell, Harvard University
	Daniel Carpenter, Harvard University	Stefano Della Vigna, University of California, Berkeley
	Howell E. Jackson, Harvard Law School	Damon Jones, University of Chicago
	Eric Johnson, Columbia Business School	Dean Karlan, Yale University
	David Laibson, Harvard University	John G. Lynch Jr., Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado at Boulder
	Brigitte Madrian, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University	Adair Morse, University of Chicago
	Sendhil Mullainathan, Harvard University	John W. Payne, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University
	Antoinette Schoar, Sloan School of Management, MIT	Amit Seru, University of Chicago
	Eldar Shafir, Princeton University	Suzanne Shu, Anderson School of Management, UCLA
	Paige Marta Skiba, Vanderbilt University Law School	Nicholas S. Souleles, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
	Justin Sydnor, University of Madison, Wisconsin	Jeremy Tobacman, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
	Peter Tufano, Harvard Business School	Stephen Zeldes, Columbia University
	Jonathan Zinman, Dartmouth College

Consumer Finance Working Group