The proposed change in the penny : hearing before the Subcommittee on Consumer Affairs and Coinage of the Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs, House of Reprensentatives, Ninety-seventh Congress, first session, March 31, 1981.

"Serial no. 97-4."

To amend the Electronic Fund Transfer Act : hearing before the Subcommittee on Consumer Affairs of the Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs, House of Representatives, Ninety-sixth Congress, first session, on H.R. 3552 ... May 1, 1979.

"Serial 96-15."

Oversight hearings on the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin and mint operations : hearings before the Subcommittee on Consumer Affairs and the Subcommittee on General Oversight and Renegotiation of the Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs, House of Representatives, sixty-sixth Congress, first session, September 25 and 26, 1979.

"Serial 96-30."

Oversight on 1984 Olympic commemorative coin designs : hearing before the Subcommittee on Consumer Affairs and Coinage of the Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs, House of Representatives, Ninety-seventh Congress, second session, December 1, 1982.

Item 1013-A, 1013-B (microfiche)

The American Eagle Gold Coin Act of 1982 : hearing before the Subcommittee on Consumer Affairs and Coinage of the Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs, House of Representatives, Ninety-seventh Congress, second session, on H.R. 6054 ... September 28, 1982.

Item 1013-A, 1013-B (microfiche)

Study of consumer expenditures, incomes, and savings; statistical tables: Urban U. S.--1950, tabulated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U. S. Dept. of Labor, for the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, University of Pennsylvania.

Mode of access: Internet.

A new credit crunch? : the cost of credit for consumers and small businesses in New England : field hearing before the Subcommittee on Consumer Credit and Insurance of the Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs, House of Representatives, One Hundred Third Congress, second session, October 12, 1994.

Mode of access: Internet.

Amendments to the Fair Credit Reporting Act : hearing before the Subcommittee on Consumer Affairs and Coinage of the Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs, House of Representatives, One Hundred First Congress, second session, June 12, 1990.

Mode of access: Internet.

Experts vs. Discounters: Consumer Free Riding and Experts Withholding Advice in Markets for Credence Goods

This paper studies the incentives for credence goods experts to invest effort in diagnosis if effort is both costly and unobservable, and if they face competition by discounters who are not able to perform a diagnosis. The unobservability of diagnosis effort and the credence characteristic of the good induce experts to choose incentive compatible tariff structures. This makes them vulnerable to competition by discounters. We explore the conditions under which honestly diagnosing experts survive competition by discounters; we identify situations in which experts misdiagnose consumers in order to prevent them from free-riding on experts' advice; and we discuss policy options to solve the free-riding consumers–cheating experts problem.

Are consumers fooled by discounts? An experimental test in a consumer search environment

In this article, we investigate experimentally whether people search optimally and how price promotions influence search behaviour. We implement a sequential search task with exogenous price dispersion in a baseline treatment and introduce discounts in two experimental treatments. We find that search behaviour is roughly consistent with optimal search but also observe some discount biases. If subjects do not know in advance where discounts are offered, the purchase probability is increased by 19 percentage points in shops with discounts, even after controlling for the benefit of the discount and for risk preferences. If consumers know in advance where discounts are given, then the bias is only weakly significant and much smaller (7 percentage points).

Discounts and consumer search behavior : the role of framing

This paper studies the pure framing effect of price discounts, focusing on its impact on consumer search behavior. In a simple two-shop search experiment, we compare search behavior in base treatments (where both shops post net prices without discounts) to discount treatments (where either the first shop or the second shop posts gross prices with separate discount offers, keeping the net prices constant). Although the objective search problems are identical across treatments, subjects search less in discount frames, irrespective where the discount is offered. There is evidence showing that subjects only base their decisions on salient characteristics of the situation rather than on the objective price information.

Consumer confidence indices and stock markets’ meltdowns

Consumer confidence indices (CCIs) are a closely monitored barometer of countries’ economic health and an informative forecasting tool. Using European and US data, we provide a case study of the two recent stock market meltdowns (the post-dotcom bubble correction of 2000–2002 and the 2007–2009 decline at the beginning of the financial crisis) to contribute to the discussion on their appropriateness as proxies for stock markets’ investor sentiment. Investor sentiment should positively covary with stock market movements (DeLong, Shleifer, Summers, and Waldmann 1990); however, we find that the CCI–stock market relationship is not universally positive.We also do not find support for the information effect documented in the previous literature, but identify a more subtle relationship between consumer expectations about future household finances and stock market fluctuations.

Essays on asymmetric information problems without the single-crossing property: applications to corporate finance

The objective of this dissertation is to re-examine classical issues in corporate finance, applying a new analytical tool. The single-crossing property, also called Spence-irrlees condition, is not required in the models developed here. This property has been a standard assumption in adverse selection and signaling models developed so far. The classical papers by Guesnerie and Laffont (1984) and Riley (1979) assume it. In the simplest case, for a consumer with a privately known taste, the single-crossing property states that the marginal utility of a good is monotone with respect to the taste. This assumption has an important consequence to the result of the model: the relationship between the private parameter and the quantity of the good assigned to the agent is monotone. While single crossing is a reasonable property for the utility of an ordinary consumer, this property is frequently absent in the objective function of the agents for more elaborate models. The lack of a characterization for the non-single crossing context has hindered the exploration of models that generate objective functions without this property. The first work that characterizes the optimal contract without the single-crossing property is Araújo and Moreira (2001a) and, for the competitive case, Araújo and Moreira (2001b). The main implication is that a partial separation of types may be observed. Two sets of disconnected types of agents may choose the same contract, in adverse selection problems, or signal with the same levei of signal, in signaling models.