This paper examines the interactional phenomenon where an institutional complainee initiates a complaint and becomes a co-complainant with their original complainant against a third party that is proposed to have caused grievances to both participants. Institutional complainees initiate their third-party complaints when their complainants repeatedly refuse to affiliate with their attempts to shift responsibility or their proposed solutions. This shift from being the complainee to being a co-complainant is regularly accomplished through practices in which the institutional complainee: 1) produces implicit counter-complaints; 2) partitions complainants and themselves as sharing similar identities; and 3) highlights and upgrades their own grievances. Once complainants affiliate with their complaints, institutional complainees attempt to end the complaint sequences. The interactions end with a sense of solidarity sustained between the participants, even though no satisfying solutions are offered to the original complainants. The findings suggest that institutional actors can make relevant their noninstitutional identities and go against what is expected of them as institutional actors to achieve the institutional task of directing blame away from their institutions. Recorded phone conversations between local residents and various institutional actors during COVID-19 lockdowns in China serve as data for this study.

While it is generally believed that pressure from peers induces employees to improve their efficiency and performance, little is known about whether employees' improved performance is detrimental to the interests of others. Based on a granular dataset at the individual-month level of investment advisors' and customers’ accounts from a large retail bank in China, we find that peer pressure, as measured by the performance of advisors relative to their colleagues in the previous month, can induce the advisors to sell more financial products, but can also exacerbate misselling, resulting in a significant increase in sales of poor-quality financial products ("high-risk-low-return" products). The causal link is identified with an exogenous change of peer size. The peer pressure effects are pronounced among poor performance advisors, and client complaints play a monitoring role in curbing misselling. By exploring the correspondence between advisors and clients, we find that misselling occurs mainly between female advisors and male clients, and between advisors who lack work experience and clients who lack investment experience.

We investigate the effect of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s 2015 disclosure of complaint narratives on reducing racial disparities in financial services. Employing a triple-differences approach that compares the performance of affected and unaffected financial institutions across communities with varying racial compositions, we find that post-disclosure, minority communities experience welfare enhancements. These include higher savings interest rates (amounting to over $50 million annually), reduced maintenance fees, and lower interest rates on auto loans and credit cards. The research emphasizes the broad impact of service quality disclosure in mitigating racial disparities in savings and lending markets.

This paper provides the first theory and evidence on the role of presale policies in the residential housing market. We start with constructing a novel dataset of unfinished projects, presale policies, and land auction outcomes across 270 major cities in China. We then identify 2,330 unfinished residential projects from 2010 to 2017 on a citizen complaint website run by the central government. We find that both presale criterion and postsale supervision of construction costs relate to a lower probability of unfinished projects. But only presale criterion relates negatively to the pace of new housing development, measured by developers' multitasking and land auction outcomes. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the average bundle of presale policies is inferior to the Pareto frontier in our sampled cities. Tightening the regulation on postsale supervision by 2 standard deviations may lead to a 58% reduction in the occurrence of unfinished projects, while keeping the pace of new housing development unchanged. Eliminating unfinished projects would entail a drastic increase in both presale criterion and postsale supervision, with slower housing development.