Adverse Selection in the Credit Card Market (信用卡市場的逆向選擇)
作者及寫作年份:
Lawrence M. Ausubel
June 17, 1999
部分摘要:
trading situations where one (informed) party possesses information which is relevant to his (uninformed)trading partner, the informed party may find it advantageous to engage in trade only in states of informationwhich are relatively unfavorable from the viewpoint of the uninformed party. Thus, a firm which offers acontract to the general population may find that the composition of the pool of customers who accept thefirm's contract is inferior to the composition of the general population. The particular contractual termsoffered by the firm may influence the composition of the customer pool and, in some informationalenvironments, adverse selection may lead to a complete unraveling of the market (George A. Akerlof,1970).Many of the economically-richest implications of adverse selection have been drawn in creditmarkets. High interest rates charged to borrowers may induce adverse selection on default probability,leading banks to engage in credit rationing in high-interest environments (Joseph E. Stiglitz and AndrewWeiss, 1981). Competition along particular dimensions in credit card pricing may result in adverseselection, blunting the usual effects of competition, and contributing to sticky interest rates and extranormalprofits (Lawrence M. Ausubel, 1991). And, when borrowers have the opportunity to engage in signalingbehavior, the same structure of asymmetric information as in adverse selection models yields signalingstories which have important implications for corporate investment and the capital structure of firms (see,for example, Sudipto Bhattacharya, 1979, and Stewart C. Myers and Nicholas S. Majluf, 1984).Yet despite a burgeoning economics and finance literature consisting of literally hundreds of articlesexploring the implications of adverse selection in credit markets, there remains little in the way of empiricalstudies which convincingly document the existence of adverse selection in credit markets as a real-worldphenomenon. The objective of the current paper is to present compelling direct evidence of adverseselection in one specific credit market.The stakes in such an empirical exercise are quite considerable. It is frequently argued that virtuallyany conclusion may be reached from a suitably-chosen economic model of incomplete information.However, to the extent that adverse selection can be shown to be a genuine empirical phenomenon in creditmarkets, then we can have confidence that at least one important component
閱讀全文PDF格式: e an important issue in the banking community as cardholders seek to move their revolving credit to the lowest-cost lenders. This kind of “search and switch” behavior would be expected to put downward
pressure on credit card interest rates. Previous research on the credit card market focused on why its interest rates persisted at levels greater than those for other types of consumer loans, and one explanation put forward was the inhibiting nature of high search costs in this market, especially for large-balance cardholders whose probability of credit rejection
is high. Recent developments in the credit card industry – in particular the Truth-in-
Lending Act of 1988 together with a large increase in direct solicitations – have changed the environment of this market substantially. Because of this new environment, as well as improvements in data availability, the issue of credit card search needs to be revisited.
The current paper identifies those consumers whose probability of rejection is
high and tests whether this probability has any impact on their search propensities. It
does this by analyzing (i) the effect of large balances on the consumer’s probability of credit application rejection and (ii) how these factors – large balances and rejection probability –affect consumers’ search propensities. In testing the search-cost hypothesis, the issue of endogeneity between consumers’ search and the likelihood of rejection is dealt with by estimating a simultaneous equations model. The results presented here show no evidence that search costs deter consumer
interest rate search in the credit card market of the 1990s, either for high-balance. This is officially known as the Fair Credit and Charge Card Disclosure Act of 1988. cardholders with a greater probability of rejection or for low-balance cardholders. In the next section we review the relevant literature on this market and discuss recent changes in the market environment. Section III discusses our methodology and improvements in the
recent data. Section IV presents our results. Finally, Section V concludes by
summarizing our find....
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閱讀全文PDF格式:
http://www.econ.ohio-state.edu/pdf/ldunn/wp02-03.pdf
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