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Misselling (financial) products: the limits for internal compliance

  • This paper considers a firm that has to delegate to an agent, such as a mortgage broker or a security dealer, the twin tasks of approaching and advising customers. The main contractual restriction, in particular in light of related research in Inderst and Ottaviani (2007), is that the firm can only compensate the agent through commissions. This standard contracting restriction has the following key implications. First, the firm can only ensure internal compliance to a "standard of sales", in terms of advice for the customer, if this standard is not too high. Second, if this is still feasible, then a higher standard is associated with higher, instead of lower, sales commissions. Third, once the limit for internal compliance is approached, tougher regulation and prosecution of "misselling" have (almost) no effect on the prevailing standard. Besides having practical implications, in particular on how to (re-)regulate the sale of financial products, the novel model, which embeds a problem of advice into a framework with repeated interactions, may also be of separate interest for future work on sales force compensation. JEL Classification: D18 (Consumer Protection), D83 (Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge), M31 (Marketing), M52 (Compensation and Compensation Methods and Their Effects).

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Metadaten
Author:Roman InderstORCiDGND
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30-72951
URL:http://www.imfs-frankfurt.de/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf/WP_2009_35_Inderst.pdf
Parent Title (German):Working paper series / Institute for Monetary and Financial Stability ; 35
Series (Serial Number):Working paper series / Institute for Monetary and Financial Stability (35)
Document Type:Working Paper
Language:English
Year of Completion:2009
Year of first Publication:2009
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Release Date:2009/12/08
GND Keyword:Agency-Theorie; Vergütung; Verbraucherschutz
Note:
Published in: Economics Letters, 2010, vol. 106, issue 1, pp. 35-37
HeBIS-PPN:220371547
Institutes:Wissenschaftliche Zentren und koordinierte Programme / Institute for Monetary and Financial Stability (IMFS)
Dewey Decimal Classification:3 Sozialwissenschaften / 33 Wirtschaft / 330 Wirtschaft
Licence (German):License LogoDeutsches Urheberrecht