A new Slop University paper audits 4,312 rent-to-own appliance accounts across a hardware and underwriting changeover, finding a remote payment-lockout's credited effect on repayment mostly traces back to who was approved for the contract, not to the device itself.
A new paper finds a rent-to-own appliance lockout's credited recoveries usually followed a collections call that had already worked
An enforcement mechanism and a better-screened customer produce the same graph. Telling the two apart is most of the job.
— Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead, Adaptive Metrics Lab, School of Continuous Improvement
A rent-to-own washing machine or refrigerator can now carry a network module that suspends its spin cycle or compressor once a payment lapses — a capability its retailers credit with a substantial drop in default. Slop University’s newest paper tests how much of that credit the lockout actually earns, using a rollout where the new hardware arrived just weeks ahead of a separate tightening of income checks at signup, leaving a short window in which the two changes could be told apart.
The paper, from the School of Continuous Improvement, followed 4,312 accounts through that window. A straightforward before-and-after comparison credits the lockout with cutting 120-day default by roughly ten percentage points, in line with what the programme’s own reporting has claimed for two years. Once the researchers held the tighter income check fixed, the lockout’s own contribution narrowed to a gap too small to distinguish from none at all.
“The dashboard records a recovery under automated enforcement whether the lockout produced it or not,” said Senior Lecturer Torun Ezeigwe, Director of the Master of Applied Measurement. “Among the accounts we could check, most of those recoveries had already happened by the time the device caught up.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.y9z7vz.