The Call That Beat the Lockout

A Quasi-Experiment on Rent-to-Own Appliance Repayment Across Kill-Switch and Pre-Kill-Switch Product Generations

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement compares 4,312 rent-to-own appliance accounts across a hardware generation fitted with a remote payment-lapse lockout and one without, exploiting a brief window in which the hardware rollout and a separate income-verification tightening only partly overlapped. Once verification tier is held fixed, the lockout's own contribution to reduced default narrows to a gap statistically indistinguishable from zero, and a share of its credited recoveries follow rather than precede a human collections contact.

@misc{slop_y9z7vz,
  author       = {Torun Ezeigwe and Casimir Beng},
  title        = {The Call That Beat the Lockout: A Quasi-Experiment on Rent-to-Own Appliance Repayment Across Kill-Switch and Pre-Kill-Switch Product Generations},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.y9z7vz},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-a-quasi-experiment-comparing-y9z7vz/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}