Finding the ‘low hanging fruit': Modelling and experimentation in consumer debt collection organisations

In the world of consumer debt collection, econometric analysis is often used to help debt purchasers price debt portfolios. But an additional usage is, by looking at the past performance of accounts, to help collectors identify for particular attention what one industry consultant referred to as the ‘low hanging fruit’. These are defaulting debtors who have in the past shown signs of being the kind of people that are more likely to repay and/or the kind of people likely to repay more (than others in an otherwise similar situation). More precisely, these techniques seek out emergent, embodied tendencies, formed out of particular combinations of life history and lived body, that, for the collector that can both identify and connect to them, offers a major competitive advantage. These in vitro techniques, in turn, are connected to forms of performative, in vivo experimentation. That is to say, modelling techniques are connected to responsive analyses of the reactions of individual debtors to a range of collections prompts (e.g. letters, phonecalls). Both the debtor’s past and their actions as they move through the present are shown to provide the empirical grounding for a process of repeated affective ‘testing’, aimed at discovering—and profiting from—minute variations in debtor dispositions. In exploring these processes, the paper explores the apparently perverse politics that, at times, these process can appear to imply. It also makes an argument for an STS informed approach to the study of market processes (what has been referred to as the 'economization' programme) sensitive to the centrality of emergent, embodied life to many contemporary consumer market technologies and practices.