The recent episode of rising consumer bankruptcy and increasing foreclosure rates has sparked a lively debate about how to best tackle the crisis in the U.S. housing market. This paper contributes to the debate by providing an explicit model of the interactions of households' decisions to...

I use detailed data from an online financial management service to analyze the extent to which short-run impatience can explain why people hold expensive credit card balances. I first measure the sensitivity of consumption spending to paycheck receipt for each user and argue that it provides a...

We use data from eBay to identify hundreds of thousands of instances in which retailers posted otherwise identical product listings with targeted variation in pricing and auction design. We use these matched listings to measure the dispersion in auction prices for identical goods sold by the...

The internet has dramatically reduced the cost of varying prices, displays and information provided to consumers, facilitating both active and passive experimentation. We document the prevalence of targeted pricing and auction design variation on eBay, and identify hundreds of thousands of...