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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.  Read More

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 Bureau

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 and Working Papers

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

This article, by Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir and Marianne Bertrand, considers several aspects of economic decision making among the poor, and it focuses on potential contributions from marketing.

See all reports and working papers

Call for Proposals

Smart Disclosure Research and Demonstration Design Competition

"Smart Disclosure” policies help consumer markets work more competitively by providing decision-makers with convenient, computable, and cogent data--both about products or services and also about personal use patterns or histories. As part of their ongoing support for research on behavioral economics, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation are jointly sponsoring this competition to design research or demonstration projects. They seek answers to five questions about the costs and benefits that “choice engines” can have in complex consumer markets.

Read more about this competition.

Working Group Members
Thomas Baker,
University of Pennsylvania Law School		 Michael Barr,
University of Michigan Law School
Shlomo Benartzi,
Anderson School of Management, UCLA		 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
Eric Johnson,
Columbia Business School		 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
Sendhil Mullainathan,
Harvard University		 John W. Payne,
Fuqua School of Business, Duke University
Antoinette Schoar,
Sloan School of Management, MIT		 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
Jonathan Zinman,
Dartmouth College