Are Consumer Financial Spinning and its Propensity to Deceive Counterproductive Economic Behaviors?

In this article, the authors explain how rational consumers of financial products become irrational, that is, adopt behaviors that impede on their consumer experience, and how deception is at the heart of this phenomenon. We draw a perceptual map to show the continuum between rational-based and irrational-based economic models and deploy the key psychological constructs that cause the transfer from one state to the next, a phenomenon we label consumer financial spinning. Four constructs are used to describe a dysfunctional, volatile market where policy- and agent-driven variables approach equilibrium and then soon depart from it: unmonitored predatory utility maximization, deception, risky behavior, and debt. We retrieve data from the Global Financial Crisis to detect deceitful behaviors from macro-economic data. We provide the results of a field study using the same parameters. We show that deception is likely to increase in a predatory context, which may harm consumers, thus producing counterproductive effects, such as foreclosures or bankruptcies. Lenders are provided cues and a practical assessment grid to assess the probability that their clients will resort to deception as they become increasingly desperate. This is something neither traditional nor behavioral finance and economics have offered before.