[Credit] scoring : predicting, understanding and explaining consumer behaviour

This thesis stems from my research into the broad area of (credit) scoring and the predicting, understanding and explaining of consumer behaviour. This research started at the Univers1ty of Edinburgh on an ESRC funded project in 1988. This work, which is being submitted as the partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy of Loughborough Unvers1ty, consists of an introductory chapter and a selection of papers published 1991 - 2001 (inclusive). The papers address some of the key issues and areas of interest and concern arising from the rapidly evolving and expanding credit (card) market and the highly competitive nature of the credit industry. These features were particularly evident during the late 1980's and throughout the 90's Chapter One provides a general background to the research and outlines some of the key (practical) issues involved in building a (credit) scorecard Additionally, it provides a brief summary of each of the research papers appearing in full in Chapters 2- 9 (inclusive) and ends with some general limitations and conclusions. The research papers appearing in Chapters 2-9 inclusive) are all concerned with predicting, understanding and explaining different types of consumer behaviour in relation to the use of credit cards. For example discriminating between 'GOOD' and 'BAD' repayers of credit card debt on the basis of different definitions of good and bad, the identification of 'slow payers' using different statistical methods; examining the characteristics of credit card users and non-users, and identifying the characteristics of credit card holders most likely to return their credit card.