Splitting Bills to the Cent Speeds Repayment and Ends the Shout

A Natural Experiment in Household Bill-Splitting Apps, Settlement Latency, and Small-Debt Forgiveness

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement compares 64 share houses that adopted a cent-accurate bill-splitting application partway through a shared lease against 58 households that continued an informal whiteboard tally, tracking 5,214 logged debts across a 20-week panel. Households that switched settled debts in a median of 1.2 days against 5.1-5.6 days for the comparison group, but the share of small debts (under $10) forgiven rather than repaid fell from 41.2% to 8.7%; a one-tap "forgive" feature added to a subsample midway through the study left the forgiveness rate unchanged.

@misc{slop_g781n1,
  author       = {Thandiwe Solberg and Bram Ntuli and Ingeborg Nwachukwu},
  title        = {Splitting Bills to the Cent Speeds Repayment and Ends the Shout: A Natural Experiment in Household Bill-Splitting Apps, Settlement Latency, and Small-Debt Forgiveness},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.g781n1},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-a-natural-experiment-g781n1/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}