How Do Consumers Avoid Penalty Fees? Evidence from Credit Cards

Default Effects of Credit Card Minimum Payments

Credit card minimum payments are designed to ensure that individuals pay down their debt over time, and scheduling minimum automatic repayments helps people avoid forgetting to repay. Yet minimum payments have additional, unintended psychological default effects by drawing attention away from the card balance due. First, once individuals set the minimum automatic repayment as the default, they then neglect to make the occasional larger repayments they made previously. As a result, individuals incur considerably more credit card interest than late payment fees avoided. Using detailed transaction data, the authors show that approximately 8% of all of the interest ever paid is due to this effect. Second, manual credit card payments are lower when individuals are prompted with minimum payment information. In an experiment, the authors test two new interventions to mitigate this effect—a prompt for full repayment and a prompt asking those repaying little to pay more—yielding large counter effects. Thus, shrouding the minimum payment option for automatic and manual payments and directing attention to the full balance may remedy the unintended effects of default minimum payments.

Side Effects of Nudging: Evidence from a Randomized Intervention in the Credit Card Market

Abstract This paper studies the direct and indirect effects of nudging, by means of a field experiment with a financial management platform in Brazil. Reminders for upcoming credit card payments reduced credit card late-payment fees by 14%, but increased overdraft fees in checking accounts by 9%. The unintended effect is concentrated in users with a history of overdraft use. These users experienced a net increase of 5% in total fees, while the rest experienced savings of 15%. The results provide clear insights for nudge design: like any policy action, nudges can have side effects, and one size may not fit all.

Do Liquidity Constraints and Interest Rates Matter for Consumer Behavior? Evidence from Credit Card Data

Abstract. This paper utilizes a unique data set of credit card accounts to analyze how people respond to credit supply. Increases in credit limits generate

Timing to the Statement: Understanding Fluctuations in Consumer Credit Use

We show that consumers spend 15% more per day in the first week following the receipt of a credit card statement than in the days just prior to the statement. This increase in spending includes both an increase in the likelihood that they use the credit card in the first weeks following their statement and an increase in transaction amount on days they use the credit card. In contrast to the effect on credit card spending, debit card spending is unaffected by credit card statement issuance, suggesting that consumers are not simply switching among modes of payment. Our estimates are based on exogenous variation from bank-assigned statement dates. We propose and test several alternative explanations to this spending puzzle: optimization of the free float, salience effect of the credit card statement, mental accounting, liquidity constraints, and automatic payments. We find that the consumers most apt to spend early in the credit card cycle tend to be those who do not revolve balances and are not close to their credit limit. Thus, this paper documents a puzzle with mixed support for several alternative explanations. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, finance.

Purchase Justifiability Drives Payment Choice: Consumers Pay with Card to Remember and Cash to Forget

AbstractAlthough consumers often have multiple payment methods at their fingertips, such as cash and credit/debit cards, prior research is silent on how consumers choose between them. We home in on a key element of purchase—purchase justifiability—that affects how consumers choose to pay. Analysis of 118,042 real-world purchases and six experiments reveals that when consumers are motivated to forget (vs. remember) a purchase because they see it as difficult (vs. easy) to justify, they have an increased preference to pay with cash (vs. card) because cards create a “paper/electronic trail” that aids memory retrieval. These payment preferences are strongest among consumers most likely to recall/track their card spending, and manifest only when card expenses are trackable. We reconcile our results with the classic effect of payment method on pain of paying and discuss implications for merchants and for financial institutions designing payment methods of the future.

What Do Consumers Really Pay on Their Checking and Credit Card Accounts? Explicit, Implicit, and Avoidable Costs

(May 2009)

Do Nudges Reduce Borrowing and Consumer Confusion in the Credit Card Market?

We study nudges that turn out to have precise null effects in reducing long‐run credit card debt. We test nudges across two field experiments covering 183,441 UK cardholders. Our first experiment studies nudges added to monthly credit card statements. Our second experiment studies letters and email nudges (separate from monthly statements) sent to cardholders who signed up to automatically pay the minimum required payment. In a follow‐up survey to our second experiment, we find that 96% of respondents underestimate the time it would take to fully repay a debt if the cardholder made only the minimum required payment. The nudges reduce this confusion, but underestimation remains overwhelmingly common.

Consumer Rationality and Credit Cards

Borrowing on credit cards at high interest rates might appear irrational. However, even low transactions costs can make credit cards attractive relative to bank loans. Credit cards also provide liquidity services by allowing consumers to avoid some of the opportunity costs of holding money. The effect of alternative interest rates on the demand for card debits can explain why credit card interest rates only partially reflect changes in the cost of funds. Credit card interest rates that are inflexible relative to the cost of funds are not inconsistent with a competitive equilibrium that yields zero profits for the marginal entrant.

What else can your payment card do? Multifunctionality of payment modes can reduce payment transparency

Payment modes (e.g., cash vs. credit card) vary in the transparency of the outflow of money. Smartcards (multifunctional cards), which bundle payment with non-payment functions (e.g., loyalty programs, identification, and other information functions), have become an increasingly popular payment mode. This shift toward multifunctionality in payment modes is assumed to reduce payment transparency and consequently to decrease consumers’ recall accuracy of past expenditures. We employ a field study to examine recall accuracy for recent purchases with cash, a single-function card, and a multifunctional card. We find that recall accuracy is lower when using a single- or a multifunction card than cash. We also find that it is not the multifunctionality of the card that results in a higher recall error but the individual usage patterns: A higher usage frequency of the non-payment functions results in a higher recall error.

The Red, the Black, and the Plastic: Paying Down Credit Card Debt for Hotels, Not Sofas

Using transaction data from a sample of 1.8 million credit card accounts, we provide the first field test of a major prediction of Prelec and Loewenstein’s theory of mental accounting: that consumers will pay off expenditure on transient forms of consumption more quickly than expenditure on durables. According to the theory, this is because the pain of paying can be offset by the future anticipated pleasure of consumption only when money is spent on consumption that endures over time. Consistent with this prediction, we found that repayment of debt incurred for nondurable goods is an absolute 10% more likely than repayment of debt incurred for durable goods. The strength of this relationship is comparable to an increment in 15 percentage points in the credit card annualized percentage rate. Our results have not only managerial implications for the structuring of financial transactions (e.g., that credit card customers should be given the option of paying off specific purchases) but also more general implications for exploiting variations in the pain of paying in incentive schemes aimed at customers and employees. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics.

Managing Mental Accounts: Payment Cards and Consumption Expenditures

Does mental accounting matter for total consumption expenditures? We exploit a unique setting in which individuals exogenously received a new credit card, without requesting one. Using random variation in the time of receipt we show that individuals temporarily increase total consumption expenditure by making purchases with the new card without reducing spending on the others. We do not observe a corresponding increase in indebtedness. Total consumption expenditure rises even for the least liquidity-constrained individuals. The evidence is consistent with consumers treating methods of payment as nonfungible budget categories, as suggested by models of mental accounting and narrow bracketing.

Overconfidence and the Credit Card Debt Puzzle

This article investigates the credit card debt puzzle. Simultaneously holding credit card debt and liquid assets is puzzling given the sizeable difference between interest rates of debt and assets. However, this behavior is common—about 31% of households in the 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances. The cost of co-holding may be justified if consumers anticipate future restrictions in credit or if they need to maintain liquidity. Other existing explanations for co-holding include impulsive spending and low financial literacy. This research reveals a new explanation for the credit card debt puzzle: consumers’ overconfidence of their financial knowledge. Using a Coarsened Exact Matching method, we found that overconfident consumers were 20%–40% more likely to co-hold credit card debt and liquid assets.

Managing Mental Accounts: Payment Cards and Consumption Expenditures

Abstract Does mental accounting matter for total consumption expenditures? We exploit a unique setting in which individuals exogenously receive a new payment card, without requesting one. Using random variation in the time of receipt, we show that individuals temporarily increase total consumption expenditure by making purchases with the new card without reducing spending on the others. We do not observe a corresponding increase in indebtedness. Total consumption expenditure rises even for the least liquidity-constrained individuals. The evidence is consistent with consumers treating methods of payment as nonfungible budget categories, as suggested by models of mental accounting and narrow bracketing.

Always Leave Home Without It: A Further Investigation of the Credit-Card Effect on Willingness to Pay

In studies involving genuine transactions of potentially high value we show that willingness-to-pay can be increased when customers are instructed to use a credit card rather than cash. The effect may be large (up to 100%) and it appears unlikely that it arises due solely to liquidity constraints. In addition to demonstrating the effect, we provide a methodology for detecting it, and our findings suggest a source of variance to test alternative explanations.

Do Customers Learn from Experience? Evidence from Retail Banking

We study customers' adoption and subsequent switching decisions with regard to a menu of three-part tariff plans offered by a commercial bank. Using a rich panel data set covering 70,510 fee-based checking accounts over 30 months, before and after the introduction of the plans, we find that most customers adopt non-cost-minimizing plans, preferring plans with large monthly allowances and high fixed payments. Furthermore, after adoption, customers who exceed their allowances and consequently pay overage fees are more likely to switch to plans with larger allowances than customers who do not experience such fees. Notably, after switching, these overage-paying customers pay higher monthly payments than before. In contrast, switching customers who did not pay overage payments before switching pay less after switching. Our findings, unlike those of previous research on experience-based learning, suggest that the behavior of experienced customers does not converge to the predictions of neoclassical models. We propose that “overage aversion,” which is closely related to loss aversion and mental accounting, is the most plausible explanation for our findings. This paper was accepted by John List, behavioral economics.

Rewards and Misperceived Spending: Experimental Evidence from Credit Cards

Using proprietary data, a survey, and an experiment with a major bank in China, this paper studies how credit card rewards affect perceived and actual consumer