The unstated assumption underlying the drive for a la carte regulation and family-friendly tiering mandates is that government can somehow magically create a right to receive video programming on any terms you wish. Certainly if you don't like what your current video service provider has to...

This Article provides the first extensive legal treatment of an important defense in the law of fraud and contracts: puffery. Legal authorities commonly say they make decisions about whether defendants should be able to utter exaggerated, optimistic, lies based on assumptions about buyer...

Given all the talk of regulatory convergence in financial markets, one would think that good data would be available regarding the actual intensity of financial regulation in developed countries as well as a robust literature about how to determine the optimal level of regulatory intensity for...

Consumers claim to hate marketing - mostly, because they get too much unwanted marketing. In response, regulators develop medium-by-medium marketing suppression regulations. Unfortunately, these ad hoc solutions do little to satisfy consumers, and dynamic technologies and business practices...

This paper considers the evidence for and against the reverse Robin Hood hypothesis. Under the “reverse Robin Hood” hypothesis, credit-card companies rob from the poor users of cash and give to the rich users of credit cards. But there are problems with this story. Indeed, the reverse Robin...

Over the past 20 years the consumer payments system has been transformed as electronic payments such as debit and credit cards have rapidly displaced legacy payment systems, especially checks. At the same time, this growth in the use of electronic payments has triggered increasing government...

Financially constrained borrowers have the incentive to influence the appraisal process in order to increase borrowing or reduce the interest rate. We document that the average valuation bias for residential refinance transactions is above 5%. The bias is larger for highly leveraged...

The Consumer Empowerment Index is a pilot exercise, aimed at obtaining a first snapshot of the state of consumer empowerment as measured by the Eurobarometer survey (Special Eurobarometer n. 342). It is neither a final answer on empowerment nor a comprehensive study on all the different facets...

We use the "symbolic contagion" concept (Rozin and Nemeroff, 1994) and its adaptation to the food modernization framework by Fischler (1994) to analyse the interactions between quality signs and points of sales -street vending, formal and informal open-air market and supermarket- in consumers...

Approximately 30% of housing defaults are strategic: the homeowner is able to make the payments but rationally chooses not to do so due to negative equity. This document describes the Responsible Homeowner Reward (“RH Reward”), an incentive plan to deter strategic defaults by increasing the...