Understanding the roles of locus of control, self-efficacy and fatalism on consumer redress for women in rural India

Interventions have been instrumental in increasing women’s access and engagement with digital financial services (DFS) in LMICs. However, notably absent from both academic and practitioner research is a focus on gender and consumer redress. Despite the severity of the societal and individual barriers that limit women’s ability to raise complaints and resolve disputes, empirical evidence is thin and fragmented.

Situating our research in India - a leading digital financial services market - our survey examines the role of intrinsic factors of locus of control, self-efficacy and fatalism in determining how women perceive and manage consumer redress behaviors, such as raising complaints, seeking alternative complaints channels, or inaction. The results from this survey will lay the groundwork for experiments that test behaviourally informed interventions to improve the consumer redress experience for women.

The research aims to answer the following question: “What is the role of individual belief systems (i.e. locus of control, fatalism, and self efficacy) in determining women’s consumer redress perceptions, attitudes, and key redressal behaviors?” We hypothesize that fatalism, external locus of control and low self-efficacy will explain inaction, low uptake, and engagement with consumer redress mechanisms.