Governance, regulation, and public trust in pawnshop services: A systematic review

Abstract

Background: Pawnbroking occupies a distinctive regulatory position because borrowers retain ownership of pledged goods while possession passes to the pawnbroker. Yet the literature describes formal rules, access to credit and service experience more often than it examines how supervision, enforcement and redress work in practice. This review examines how scholarship on pawnshop governance and regulation has evolved and how trust has been conceptualised and studied. Methods: A socio-legal systematic review, reported in accordance with PRISMA 2020, identified 87 peer-reviewed studies in Scopus after full-text assessment. The evidence was examined through narrative synthesis and inductive thematic analysis. Criterion-level methodological appraisal was used to qualify individual findings. Findings: Six overlapping themes were identified: regulatory design and enforcement; consumer protection and vulnerability; digital transformation and platform governance; financial inclusion and distributive justice; service quality and customer satisfaction; and Islamic pawnbroking. The studies addressed statutory design more clearly than the operation of supervision, enforcement and redress. Trust-related material appeared in 13 studies, although some relied on adjacent constructs such as satisfaction, reputation, perceived risk or intention to use. Direct examination of trust usually concerned the pawnbroker, the organisation or the service platform. No included study directly measured trust in regulators, complaint mechanisms or supervisory institutions. Conclusion: Formal rules, access to credit and favourable service assessments cannot by themselves show how pawnshop governance works for borrowers. Evaluation must also consider whether protection functions during the transaction and whether borrowers can obtain redress when problems arise. Novelty/Originality of this article: The review separates trust in service providers from trust in regulatory institutions. It also shows that implementation, redress and the division of responsibility in digital pawn transactions remain insufficiently examined.