Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Rent-To-Own Agreements: Customer Characteristics And Contract Outcomes, Michael H. Anderson, Sanjiv Jaggia

Economics

The rent-to-own (RTO) industry, by offering immediate access to household goods for a small periodic fee with no credit check or down payment, has strong appeal to low income and financially distressed consumers. An important policy question is whether an RTO agreement is used as a rental/lease with build-in purchase option or as something more akin to an installment loan. Given the embedded options to return the item or to purchase it early, the actual rent paid by RTO customers is substantially lower than the oft-reported total rent which assumes that agreements go to term. We employ a log-normal censored …