What Happens When You Tell Consumers You're Trying to Collect a Time-Barred Debt?

Nathalie Martin of New Mexico and Timothy E. Goldsmith of New Mexico's Psychology Department report the answer in Testing Materiality Under the Unfair Practices Acts: What Information Matters When Collecting Time-Barred Debts? Forthcoming in the Consumer Finance Law Quarterly Report.  Here's the abstract:

Should creditors and debt collectors be required to disclose the fact that a debt is time-barred when attempting to collect from a consumer? This article describes an empirical study that compares how consumers react to two different collection letters, one in which the recipients are told explicitly that the debt being collected is time-barred, and one in which they are not given this information. The study measures whether consumers are equally willing to pay the debt, when they are told that the debt is time-barred. Appended to the article are the survey questions asked of the study participants.

Spoiler alert: telling them the debt is time-barred makes a difference to their willingness to pay it.

Comments

[Account Deleted]

Hi,

First of all I must confess that I've become jealous of your site http://pubcit.typepad.com/clpblog/ after seeing it for the first time.

Actually I was going through your site, promptly dazzled by its design and witnessed many a great posts on personal finance, with lots of information. Especially this latest one.

However, I have some quality financial websites on debt, budgeting and bankruptcy with good PR, and very less OBL to maintain its quality.

And I suppose It'd be a great experience for our readers if we combine our sites by either of the following :

1. Article Exchange
2. Link exchange
3. Banner exchange

It would be great to work with you, to build a bridge between two legitimate & reputable site would be beneficial for the visitors, as well as for us.
I maintain following quality websites and blogs:

* http://www.monsterhols.com
* http://www.fileyourbankruptcy.org/
* http://www.weredefine.com/
* http://www.savedude.com/
* http://darngoodblogging.com/

Looking forward to your positive reply. Have a nice day.
--

Best Regards,

Nicole Henderson