Repayment Concentration and Consumer Motivation to Get Out of Debt
研究了多账户负债消费者在每月还款时，将还款集中到一个账户（集中策略）还是分散到所有账户（分散策略）如何影响其还债动机，发现集中策略尤其集中到最小账户时更能激发还债动力。
Many indebted consumers carry multiple credit cards with significant balances and do not generate enough income to pay off these balances in full at the end of each repayment period. In managing their debt over time, these consumers must decide how to allocate repayments across their debt accounts. This research examines how different monthly repayment allocations, varying from entirely concentrated into one debt account (i.e., a concentrated strategy) to equally dispersed across all debt accounts (i.e., a dispersed strategy), influence consumers’ motivation to repay their debts. Evidence from a field study of indebted consumers with multiple debt accounts and from three experiments shows that concentrated (vs. dispersed) repayment strategies tend to boost consumers’ motivation to become debt free, leading them to repay their debts more aggressively. Importantly, this motivating effect is most pronounced when the repayments are concentrated into consumers’ smallest accounts because consumers tend to infer overall progress in debt repayment from the greatest proportional balance reduction (proportion of starting balance repaid) within any one account. These findings advance our understanding of how consumers repay their debts and help pinpoint the psychological process by which debt repayment strategies affect consumers’ motivation to get out of debt.