Abstract
Contemporary insolvency can no longer be explained solely as an equity imbalance, but as the outcome of a digital ecosystem that induces financial decisions through the systematic exploitation of cognitive biases, affective states, and vulnerabilities in agency. This paper proposes the figure of the heuristic debtor, a subject whose economic will is modulated by algorithmic architectures that anticipate impulses, deploy variable reinforcement, and erode deliberative control. Drawing on evolutionary psychology, behavioural economics, and market-manipulation theory, it examines doom spending as an affect-driven response to structural precariousness, intensified by platforms that gamify risk and personalise consumption stimuli. It argues that such technological interference constitutes a form of emotional financial precarity that destabilises classical notions of subjective responsibility. The paper contends that bankruptcy law should incorporate a doctrine of shared algorithmic responsibility, capable of recognising the debtor's eroded agency and protecting the cognitive conditions that make autonomy possible in digital environments. This figure converges with what the paper later conceptualises as the debtor under algorithmic interference, whose agency is co-produced by digital architectures.
Link to SSRN / Paper:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6689139
