Personalized Communication and Repayment

The project aims to investigate how different communication strategies can be used to motivate defaulting debtors to pay their bills. The starting point is the consideration that digitalization leads to less direct customer contact, which in turn reduces the willingness to pay. Depending on the type of person, debtors would need to be approached in different ways to motivate them to repay. An experiment is conducted with 1000 customers of a debt collection company. Different methods of approaching different types of customers will be tested and the impact on their payment behavior will be investigated. In a final step, the participants will be asked ex-post to what extent the communication strategy has influenced their payment behavior. 

The project contributes to the understanding of the importance of communication for trust. The aim is to show that the trustworthiness of individuals is not constant, but can be specifically influenced by different communication strategies. The existing heterogeneity of individuals contributes to the fact that different communication strategies have different effects on the trustworthiness of individuals. 

Project leader: Christine Laudenbach 
Project duration: 2 years 
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