We present a critique of Behavioral Economics, the dominant approach to reforming the regulation of retail credit, and propose a new approach to managing uncertainty in consumer lending. This new approach draws on a different model of decision-making, Distributed Cognition, to improve contract...

Based, in part, on original fieldwork in Moscow, Russia, in 1998, 1999 and 2004, this paper focuses on two markets at their conception points-the American credit card market of the late 1950s and 1960s and the Russian credit card market of the 1990s. Emerging credit card markets need to solve...

Alya Guseva, Professor of Sociology at Boston University, was interviewed by Natalia Khalina, a Lecturer at the Higher School of Economics. The interview was conducted during the workshop “Consumption and Economic Crises: Post-Socialist Experiences” (Moscow, 9-10 October 2014) where A....

This paper criticizes traditional approaches to stratification, which suggest that education contributes to inequality solely by endowing people with different amounts of human capital (knowledge and skills) or credentials. What these approaches overlook is the social component of...