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Seemingly Exploitative Contracts

Pei Cheng Yu

No 2018-15, Discussion Papers from School of Economics, The University of New South Wales

Abstract: This paper studies sequential price discrimination of sophisticated present-biased consumers in the credit market. The optimal contract utilizes present bias to improve screening by inducing certain consumers to over-consume and over-accumulate debt without the presence of naivete. This shows that the optimal contract can have seemingly exploitative features that cause certain consumers to experience ex-post welfare losses even when they are sophisticated. This has important policy implications. If the intention of firms is to screen and not exploit consumers, then financial regulations aimed at protecting consumers by eliminating seemingly exploitative features could introduce additional distortions. I also analyze the optimal contract for naive consumers. The main difference between contracts for sophisticated and naıve consumers is the lack of a commitment mechanism in exploitative contracts, while the presence of teaser rates, late fees or overdraft fees does not necessarily make contracts exploitative.

Keywords: Credit contract; Financial regulations; Non-linear pricing; Present bias; Sequential screening (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D18 D82 D86 G28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2018-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-cta and nep-mic
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Journal Article: Seemingly exploitative contracts (2020) Downloads
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