Welcome to Oren Bar-Gill

Credit Slips is pleased to welcome Professor Oren Bar-Gill as a guest blogger. Professor Bar-Gill works out of the law & economics school and studies problems of behavioral economics. He has an impressive body of work on the law & economics of contract and contracting, where takes a more nuanced approach than the simple assumption that humans rationally act to maximize utility all the time. He has turned these insights to the consumer credit area. In "Seduction by Plastic," 98 Northwestern Law Review 1373 (2004), he explored how competition induces consumer lenders to systematically exploit borrowers' cognitive biases, especially the tendency to underestimate future borrowing. As he wrote in the article's abstract, "More broadly, the credit card case study demonstrates that pricing patterns can be used as indicators of a behavioral market failure, signaling a potential role for legal intervention." We thank him for taking the time to add his insights to Credit Slips.