







The Debt Payment Puzzle: An Experimental Investigation
Why do borrowing individuals fail to repay their debt optimally? We design a diagnostic laboratory experiment where we rule out selection into debt and other co
AI and the Future of Science
Information Disclosure, Cognitive Biases, and Payday Borrowing
ABSTRACT Can psychology‐guided information disclosure induce borrowers to lower their use of high‐cost debt? In a field experiment at payday stores, we find that information that makes people think less narrowly (over time) about finance costs results in less borrowing. In particular, reinforcing the adding‐up dollar fees incurred when rolling over loans reduces the take‐up of future payday loans by 11% in the subsequent 4 months. Although we remain agnostic as to the overall sufficiency of better disclosure policy to “remedy” payday borrowing, we cast the 11% reduction in borrowing in light of the relative low cost of this policy.

Comprehension Debt - the hidden cost of AI generated code.
Comprehension debt is the hidden cost to human intelligence and memory resulting from excessive reliance on AI and automation. For engineers, it applies most to agentic engineering.

Balancing Savings and Debt: Findings from an Online Experiment
Many consumers have savings and debt at the same time, and so are faced with a trade-off: how much debt to pay down versus how much savings to retain. This brie
How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt
The term technical debt is often used to refer to the accumulation of design or implementation choices that later make the software harder and more costly to understand, modify, or extend over time...

On shifting consumers from high‐interest to low‐interest debt
Abstract In the United States, many consumers are increasingly accumulating debt, much of which is harmful and expensive. Prior research has devoted a great deal of attention to understanding why consumers generally get into debt and the strategies they can use to repay existing debts. While this work has furthered the agenda of helping consumers reduce or eliminate their overall debt balances, it has failed to emphasize the fact that for many consumers, debt may be unavoidable. This article aims to promote research that addresses not only overall debt reduction but also the need for consumers to shift from more to less costly types of debt. By shedding light on the psychological reasons why consumers may naturally gravitate toward more costly forms of debt when less costly ones may be available, we offer a novel perspective on why consumers get into and stay in debt longer than they should. This new angle has the potential to spur on further research into the ways consumers can use debt more effectively and less expensively in service of the overarching goal of debt reduction.

Overconfidence and the Credit Card Debt Puzzle - ProQuest
Explore millions of resources from scholarly journals, books, newspapers, videos and more, on the ProQuest Platform.
Deep research requires a slower pace than tech industry work
Anyone working in an industry for a while will become accustomed to that culture—its processes, its norms, its values, its tacit knowledge. Much of this is incredibly valuable, of course, but these ideas can also represent constraints. There are some important impedances here between tech industry culture and research culture. In particular, tech culture is calibrated to a much faster pace. This can lead to impatience or early abandonment when confronting problems which require a researcher’s pace.
Deep research requires a slower pace than tech industry work
Anyone working in an industry for a while will become accustomed to that culture—its processes, its norms, its values, its tacit knowledge. Much of this is incredibly valuable, of course, but these ideas can also represent constraints. There are some important impedances here between tech industry culture and research culture. In particular, tech culture is calibrated to a much faster pace. This can lead to impatience or early abandonment when confronting problems which require a researcher’s pace.
The High Cost of Not Doing Experiments - Behavioral Scientist
We can pay dearly, in blood, treasure, and well-being, for experiments that aren’t done. -Richard Nisbett, Mindware

Payment Rewards and Credit Card Debt: Experimental Evidence
We report on a controlled laboratory experiment in which participants make consumption, saving, and credit card repayment decisions when credit card purchases e
Rethinking AI for Science Funding
As science stands at an inflection point, how do we organize capital to shape the future of discovery?

A ten-year drive to credit authors for their work — and why there’s still more to do
Nature - Information about the roles of each author of a paper can help to build trust, integrity and responsible research assessment. Coordinated efforts are needed to consolidate progress.

Science is a human activity. When we fail to distill and explain research, we accumulate a kind of debt...
My boiling hot take on this is that, if tech companies are going to fund this kind of research (looking at Schmidt too), then the money needs to be given *no strings* to an independent arm's length research body, pooled with other funding, and treated as a donation not as direct funding.
Hetan Shah
Anthropic AI research fund offers $5m - $30m for social science research on themes of AI impact on workers; transition initiatives; income support; building worker stakes; and wider evidence on public investments. Total fund of $200m available anthropic.com/news/economic-futures-researc…