How Do Individuals Repay Their Debt? The Balance-Matching Heuristic
利用多张信用卡的关联数据，研究发现个人还款并非优先偿还高利率卡，而是采用“余额匹配”启发式，即按各卡余额比例分配还款，这种非最优行为对经济激励不敏感且高度持久。
We study how individuals repay their debt using linked data on multiple credit cards. Repayments are not allocated to the higher interest rate card, which would minimize the cost of borrowing. Moreover, the degree of misallocation is invariant to the economic stakes, which is inconsistent with optimization frictions. Instead, we show that repayments are consistent with a balance-matching heuristic under which the share of repayments on each card is matched to the share of balances on each card. Balance matching captures more than half of the predictable variation in repayments and is highly persistent within individuals over time.