This article examines three experiments that tracked eye fixations as participants review home-loan disclosure forms. The experiments revealed confirmation biases in which participants read to confirm what they were told (e.g., "Your loan is at 4%") and then failed to look for contradictory...

This article explains what reverse mortgages are and how they work. It also analyzes who could potentially benefit from them, but why this type of loan is so problematic for many seniors. The article then considers steps that can be taken to improve the effectiveness of current federal rules and...

Congress and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (the “Bureau”) have taken major steps under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act to begin to meaningfully address the predatory practices that led to the mortgage loan crisis. However, most of the legal reforms...

Decisions that consumers make often rest on evaluations of attributes, such as how large, expensive, good, or fattening an option seems. Extant research has demonstrated that these evaluations in turn depend upon the recently experienced distribution of attribute values (e.g., positively or...

Two experiments demonstrated that consumers were much better able to use an enhanced APR disclosure proposed by the authors to identify the lower cost of two home loans then when using the currently proposed disclosure form of the CFPB and that consumers failed to focus on APR in the CFPB form...

The federal government's primary method of protecting consumers from “predatory lending” has been to enact disclosure laws that were supposed to enable consumers to make informed decisions. This article contends that notwithstanding these disclosure laws, unscrupulous mortgage brokers and...

Are consumers "foolish" or "negligent" when they trust what salespersons falsely tell them rather than read all of the terms of the contracts they sign? Should consumers be barred from bringing a fraud action on the ground that they have not "reasonably relied" upon such false statements or...

Consumer fraud (including predatory home loans) is a widespread and serious problem in the United States. To help combat this problem, forty-five states have enacted consumer fraud statutes that provide for attorney's fees to a prevailing plaintiff to address the economic feasibility problem in...