Limited and varying consumer attention: evidence from shocks to the salience of bank overdraft fees

The authors explore dynamics of limited attention in the $35 billion market for checking overdrafts, using survey content as shocks to the salience of overdraft fees. Conditional on selection into surveys, individuals who face overdraft-related questions are less likely to incur a fee in the survey month. Taking multiple overdraft surveys builds a "stock" of attention that reduces overdrafts for up to two years. The effects are significant among consumers with lower education and financial literacy. Consumers avoid overdrafts not by increasing balances but by making fewer debit transactions and cancelling automatic recurring withdrawals. The results raise new questions about consumer financial protection policy.Overdrafts ; Consumer behavior

Desingularizing bmb^m-symplectic structures

A $2n$-dimensional Poisson manifold $(M ,\Pi)$ is said to be $b^m$-symplectic if it is symplectic on the complement of a hypersurface $Z$ and has a simple Darboux canonical form at points of $Z$ which we will describe below. In this paper we will discuss a desingularization procedure which, for $m$ even, converts $\Pi$ into a family of symplectic forms $\omega_{\epsilon}$ having the property that $\omega_{\epsilon}$ is equal to the $b^m$-symplectic form dual to $\Pi$ outside an $\epsilon$-neighborhood of $Z$ and, in addition, converges to this form as $\epsilon$ tends to zero in a sense that will be made precise in the theorem below. We will then use this construction to show that a number of somewhat mysterious properties of $b^m$-manifolds can be more clearly understood by viewing them as limits of analogous properties of the $\omega_{\epsilon}$'s. We will also prove versions of these results for $m$ odd; however, in the odd case the family $\omega_{\epsilon}$ has to be replaced by a family of folded symplectic forms.Comment: new version, 13 pages, 3 figures, final version accepted at IMRN, International Mathematics Research Notice

Stokes flow analogous to viscous electron current in graphene

Electron transport in two-dimensional conducting materials such as graphene, with dominant electron-electron interaction, exhibits unusual vortex flow that leads to a nonlocal current-field relation (negative resistance), distinct from the classical Ohm's law. The transport behavior of these materials is best described by low Reynolds number hydrodynamics, where the constitutive pressure-speed relation is Stoke's law. Here we report evidence of such vortices observed in a viscous flow of Newtonian fluid in a microfluidic device consisting of a rectangular cavity$-$analogous to the electronic system. We extend our experimental observations to elliptic cavities of different eccentricities, and validate them by numerically solving bi-harmonic equation obtained for the viscous flow with no-slip boundary conditions. We verify the existence of a predicted threshold at which vortices appear. Strikingly, we find that a two-dimensional theoretical model captures the essential features of three-dimensional Stokes flow in experiments.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure

The Cauchy problem for a tenth-order thin film equation II. Oscillatory source-type and fundamental similarity solutions

Fundamental global similarity solutions of the standard form u_\g(x,t)=t^{-\a_\g} f_\g(y), with the rescaled variable y= x/{t^{\b_\g}}, \b_\g= \frac {1-n \a_\g}{10}, where \a_\g>0 are real nonlinear eigenvalues (\g is a multiindex in R^N) of the tenth-order thin film equation (TFE-10) u_{t} = \nabla \cdot(|u|^{n} \n \D^4 u) in R^N \times R_+, n>0, are studied. The present paper continues the study began by the authors in the previous paper P. Alvarez-Caudevilla, J.D.Evans, and V.A. Galaktionov, The Cauchy problem for a tenth-order thin film equation I. Bifurcation of self-similar oscillatory fundamental solutions, Mediterranean Journal of Mathematics, No. 4, Vol. 10 (2013), 1759-1790. Thus, the following questions are also under scrutiny: (I) Further study of the limit n \to 0, where the behaviour of finite interfaces and solutions as y \to infinity are described. In particular, for N=1, the interfaces are shown to diverge as follows: |x_0(t)| \sim 10 \left( \frac{1}{n}\sec\left( \frac{4\pi}{9} \right) \right)^{\frac 9{10}} t^{\frac 1{10}} \to \infty as n \to 0^+. (II) For a fixed n \in (0, \frac 98), oscillatory structures of solutions near interfaces. (III) Again, for a fixed n \in (0, \frac 98), global structures of some nonlinear eigenfunctions \{f_\g\}_{|\g| \ge 0} by a combination of numerical and analytical methods