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Alya Guseva

Bio: Alya Guseva is an academic researcher from Boston University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Credit card & Health law. The author has an hindex of 10, co-authored 26 publications receiving 479 citations. Previous affiliations of Alya Guseva include University of California & National Research University – Higher School of Economics.

Papers
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors compare the strategies that Russian and American banks use to evaluate the creditworthiness of prospective credit card holders and conclude that when actors face uncertainty and are unable to calculate risk, they rely on trust.
Abstract: The strategies that Russian and American banks use to evaluate the creditworthiness of prospective credit card holders are compared. Drawing on Knight's theory of risk and uncertainty, the authors argue that uncertainty, inherent in any credit transaction, can only be reduced to measurable risk if there are institutions that create stability over time, categorize events properly, and allow for verification and accumulation of information. In the United States, the gradual evolution of institutions underpinning rational calculation permits the transformation of uncertainty into risk. In Russia, however, such institutions are absent, and a great degree of uncertainty prevails in consumer credit. Using data from original fieldwork in Moscow, this study demonstrates that when actors face uncertainty and are unable to calculate risk, they rely on trust. Russian banks use and extend their existing social ties, or in some cases build new ties. They also exploit cardholders' own networks, unrelated to the bank, to increase their accountability through anchoring. These strategies, however, keep the market embedded, limited in size, and uninsurable. The authors conclude that calculation of probabilities (and economic rationality in its formal sense) is not an innate human ability but a social capacity that exists courtesy of institutional arrangements

243 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
Alya Guseva1
TL;DR: Lauer as mentioned in this paper presents a history of consumer surveillance and financial identity in America, from its inception to the present, with the earliest references dating back to the 1830s and a tour de force: it spans close to two centuries of detailed history, and it reveals that the first organizations devoted to consumer reporting were founded in New York in 1870; by 1890, they spread to many cities across the nation and all the way to California.
Abstract: In Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America, Josh Lauer has written a very timely book. Recent mass hacking of consumer data from major retailers and repeated leaks of millions of files from Equifax, as well as more recent— and sinister—revelations of stealth data harvesting by Facebook and other tech companies, has made it very clear that individual consumer identities are valuable raw material for the data broker industry. Yet we can neither control what goes in, nor how and by whom it is used. In what Lauer calls a modern version of a Faustian bargain, we submit to constant surveillance and acquiesce to giving up personal information in exchange for accessing various, often ‘‘free’’ content, memberships, and services. Lauer’s focus is on how this informationalindustrial complex came to be, from its inception to the present. The book is a tour de force: it spans close to two centuries of detailed history, with the earliest references dating back to the 1830s. It turns the tables on the very companies that managed to transform disparate information about individuals into a marketable commodity by selling it first to lenders, for the purpose of evaluating borrowers, and then to retailers, for the purpose of segmenting consumer markets and identifying desirable high spenders. Lauer wants to set the record straight where it has been pretty muddled: despite commonly held beliefs about the role of technology, the pervasive consumer surveillance and financial identity of today are not a result of the post-1960s rise in computer algorithms and database storage capacities. In fact, they are not twentieth-century inventions at all. As Lauer persuasively and painstakingly demonstrates, they have deep roots and are largely coterminous with the development of consumer credit, itself the product of the nineteenth rather than the twentieth century. Drawing on rich historical accounts, Lauer reveals that the first organizations devoted to consumer reporting were founded in New York in 1870; by 1890, they spread to many cities across the nation and all the way to California. The capacity of these early organizations with respect to consumer surveillance varied greatly: some merely produced basic blacklists of borrowers who defaulted on their obligations, while others dabbled in much more sophisticated rating systems or published annual reference books listing tens of thousands of individuals (with their addresses, occupations, and candid assessments of their reliability as borrowers). But it is these nineteenth-century attempts to collect and commodify information about individuals that laid the groundwork for the pervasive national consumer surveillance infrastructure of today. This early consumer surveillance was as sophisticated in nature as it was expansive, and it should not be written off as primitive or limited in scale. Already before the Second World War, Lauer reports that the financial lives of millions of Americans were effectively traced, and this information was no longer local but could follow individuals as they moved across the nation. What is particularly surprising is that the scale and sophistication of this rapidly developing surveillance capacity did not just rival but, according to Lauer, dwarfed that of the nation-state. The book provides evidence that local police departments and government agencies often 186 Reviews

39 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigate how personal networks, conceived as a source of social capital, created during the schooling process impact occupational success and find that these networks are especially important for occupational success because they are more tailored to one's occupational interests and aspirations than are friendships made through church or neighborhood organizations.
Abstract: I Introduction IN THIS PAPER WE CRITIQUE TRADITIONAL APPROACHES to stratification, which suggest that education contributes to inequality solely by endowing people with different amounts of human capital (i.e., knowledge and skills) or credentials. What these approaches overlook is the social component of education--friends, acquaintances and other connections one accumulates while in school. We investigate how personal networks, conceived as a source of social capital, created during the schooling process impact occupational success. They serve as a channel through which applicants gain information about jobs and employers acquire information regarding applicants. II Review of the Literature THE MAJORITY OF STATUS ATTAINMNET AND HUMAN CAPITAL THEORISTS believe that education contributes to stratification because it provides people with skills and knowledge that are used in the marketplace to attain better-paying jobs (Becker 1975; Mincer 1974; Blau and Duncan 1967; Jencks et al. 1972; Featherman and Hauser 1978). Signaling theorists, on the other hand, maintain that education is instrumental in determining one's life chances because it functions as a credential that employers use to screen job applicants (Arrow 1973; Spence 1973; Blaug 1985). Despite their differences, both paradigms conceive of schooling as the process by which atomized individuals acquire knowledge or credentials. Such a vision of schooling can be compared to a mass production factory in which children and young adults, isolated from one another, enter the processing machine on conveyer belts, where they are injected with knowledge and skills or stamped with credentials at the end of the line. This traditional, atomized view of education exaggerates the explanatory power attributed to human capital and credentials and ignores the role that social capital created during the schooling process plays in distributing societal rewards. When scholars report the effect of education on occupational success, human capital is not the only thing being measured, as it is assumed. Rather, the benefits of social capital gained during the schooling process confound the effect. We believe that education contributes to the system of stratification not only because it provides individuals with knowledge, skills and credentials that are used to gain leverage in the job market, but also because it creates networks of connections that both individuals and their prospective employers can draw upon in order to find each other. School-based networks are especially important for occupational success because they are more tailored to one's occupational interests and aspirations than are friendships made through church or neighborhood organizations. In addition, they are indirectly helpful as individuals gain access to new professional networks through previously established school-based networks. Since these networks are a product of the structure of relationships between people, and since they facilitate social actions, they are a potential generator of what has become generally termed social capital (Coleman 1990). Social capital can be conceptualized as either a public or a private good (Putnam 2000:20-21; Portes 1998; Coleman 1990). Public good applications of social capital focus on how generalized norms, which are bounded to a specific geographical area, make particular forms of social action possible. In this conceptualization, places, not people, posses this social capital, although individuals can take advantage of it (Putnam 1993; Woolcock 1998; Coleman 1990). Because it is a public good, those that utilize this form of social capital may not be the same people that invest in its growth. In this paper we treat social capital as a private good--an asset that individuals possess as a result of their taking part in a set of social relationships or a group (Bourdieu 1986; Coleman 1990; Schiff 1992; Burt 1992). …

34 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article showed that Gerber's model is incomplete and once they add missing variables in the selection equation the model reduces to simple Analysis of Covariance Regression suggesting no selection effect, and more general doubts about ESR.

33 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors review the literature in sociology and related fields on the fast global growth of consumer credit and debt and the possible explanations for this expansion, and report on research on two areas in which consumer credit is consequential: its effects on social relations and on physical and mental health.
Abstract: We review the literature in sociology and related fields on the fast global growth of consumer credit and debt and the possible explanations for this expansion. We describe the ways people interact with the strongly segmented consumer credit system around the world—more specifically, the way they access credit and the way they are held accountable for their debt. We then report on research on two areas in which consumer credit is consequential: its effects on social relations and on physical and mental health. Throughout the article, we point out national variations and discuss explanations for these differences. We conclude with a brief discussion of the future tasks and challenges of comparative research on consumer credit.

32 citations


Cited by
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Journal Article
TL;DR: A Treatise on the Family by G. S. Becker as discussed by the authors is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics.
Abstract: A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

4,817 citations

Journal Article
TL;DR: A critical review of the four main research lines in network analysis is given in this paper, where the authors underline the importance of space decentralized joined production in the development of new production processes and commercialization of new products.
Abstract: This paper gives a critical review of the four main research lines in network analysis. Authors begin with the discussion of an informal aspect of the networks - the role of the social ties in job search, mobilization of collective action and information transferring. After that the authors turn to the analysis of the more developed and formal direction of the network analysis, devoted to the networks and power. The next step is the consideration of the de-evolution of the big vertically centralized integrated firm and its division in complicated relation networks. Finally the paper deals with production networks where the authors underline the importance of space decentralized joined production in the development of new production processes and commercialization of new products. The paper focuses on the studies that demonstrated the main role of the networks in economic life and those studies that complement to each other.

934 citations

01 Jan 1996
TL;DR: In this paper, anthropological research on the micro-credit program of the Grameen Bank shows that bank workers are expected to increase disbursement of loans among their members and press for high recovery rates to earn profit necessary for economic viability of the institution.
Abstract: Abstract There is a growing acknowledgement that micro-credit programs have potential for equitable and sustainable development. However, my anthropological research on the micro-credit program of the Grameen Bank shows that bank workers are expected to increase disbursement of loans among their members and press for high recovery rates to earn profit necessary for economic viability of the institution. To ensure timely repayment in the loan centers bank workers and borrowing peers inflict an intense pressure on women clients. In the study community many borrowers maintain their regular payment schedules through a process of loan recycling that considerably increases the debt-liability on the individual households, increases tension and frustration among household members, produces new forms of dominance over women and increases violence in society.

740 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article used two laboratory experiments to investigate the effects of contracts on interpersonal trust and found that the use of binding contracts to promote or mandate cooperation will lead interacting parties to attribute others' cooperation to the constraints imposed by the contract rather than to the individuals themselves, thus reducing the likelihood of trust developing.
Abstract: This paper uses two laboratory experiments to investigate the effects of contracts on interpersonal trust. We predict that the use of binding contracts to promote or mandate cooperation will lead interacting parties to attribute others' cooperation to the constraints imposed by the contract rather than to the individuals themselves, thus reducing the likelihood of trust developing. We also predict that, although non-binding contracts may not generate as much initial cooperation as binding contracts, they will generate personal rather than situational attributions for any cooperation that results and will therefore not interfere with trust development. Two experiments investigated the effects of the use and removal of binding and non-binding contracts. When binding contracts that were previously allowed were no longer allowed or no longer chosen, trust dropped significantly. In contrast, non-binding contracts led to considerable cooperation, and their removal reduced trust less than removing binding contra...

653 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A review of the relationship between markets and the moral order can be found in this paper, where the authors evaluate how today's scholarship approaches the relationship and argue that a moralized view of markets has become increasingly prominent in economic sociology.
Abstract: Upon what kind of moral order does capitalism rest? Conversely, does the market give rise to a distinctive set of beliefs, habits, and social bonds? These questions are certainly as old as social science itself. In this review, we evaluate how today’s scholarship approaches the relationship between markets and the moral order. We begin with Hirschman’s characterization of the three rival views of the market as civilizing, destructive, or feeble in its effects on society. We review recent work at the intersection of sociology, economics, and political economy and show that these views persist both as theories of market society and moral arguments about it. We then argue that a fourth view, which we call moralized markets, has become increasingly prominent in economic sociology. This line of research sees markets as cultural phenomena and moral projects in their own right, and seeks to study the mechanisms and techniques by which such projects are realized in practice.

598 citations