Playing the credit score game: algorithms, ‘positive’ data and the personification of financial objects

an article by Mark Kear (University of Arizona, Tucson, USA) published in Economy and Society Volume 46 Issue 3-4 (August-November 2017)

Abstract

This paper is about how people are learning to ‘make themselves up’ in response to the market’s new algorithmic ways of seeing. More specifically, it explores how the self-datafication of informal financial relations is being used to affect the calculation of credit score.

I argue that credit score functions as a legal technology of arbitration beset with contradictions that are giving rise to inchoate struggles over the distribution of calculative agency in consumer credit markets.

Drawing on an ethnographic case study of credit building peer ‘lending circles’, the paper explores how financially marginalized groups and financial inclusion advocates are reacting to the blind spots and biases of credit-scoring algorithms through compensatory and transgressive data-generation practices.

I think that this is called “cooking the books” except that the books these days are not words on paper but digits inside a computer program.

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