סמינר בשיווק

Dr. Adam Greenberg,Anderson School of Management, University of California (Los Angeles)

Paper 1: Consumer Debt and HappinessDoes carrying debt influence consumers' overall happiness? Four studies examine the relationship between consumers' debt holdings and their happiness, finding that the relationship depends on the type of debt. Though mortgages tend to comprise consumers' largest debts, and credit card balances tend to be the most costly, it is student loans that have a significant negative effect on happiness. This is because unlike the other debt types, consumers mentally label their student loans as a "debt." These findings suggest that consumers' debt holdings can undermine their emotional well-being, particularly when consumers perceive their debts to be "debt."
Paper 2: Debt Type Sensitivity Predicts Financial HealthFinancial decisions have important consequences for overall well-being; consequently, recent research in psychology has aimed to understand how people think about debt. Yet, existing work has largely failed to examine how attitudes and behaviors systematically vary as a function of debt type. We demonstrate not only that there are individual differences in attitudes toward high-interest (e.g., payday loans) and low-interest (e.g., car loans) forms of debt, but also that the extent to which an individual finds high-interest debts more aversive than low-interest debts predicts financial health. This relationship cannot be explained by financial literacy, numeracy, or intertemporal discounting, but can be partially explained by differences in cognitive flexibility. This research is the first to identify sensitivity to debt type as an individual difference that is important for financial decision making.