When Motivation is against Debtors' Best Interest: The Illusion of Goal Progress in Credit Card Debt Repayment

On shifting consumers from high‐interest to low‐interest debt

Abstract In the United States, many consumers are increasingly accumulating debt, much of which is harmful and expensive. Prior research has devoted a great deal of attention to understanding why consumers generally get into debt and the strategies they can use to repay existing debts. While this work has furthered the agenda of helping consumers reduce or eliminate their overall debt balances, it has failed to emphasize the fact that for many consumers, debt may be unavoidable. This article aims to promote research that addresses not only overall debt reduction but also the need for consumers to shift from more to less costly types of debt. By shedding light on the psychological reasons why consumers may naturally gravitate toward more costly forms of debt when less costly ones may be available, we offer a novel perspective on why consumers get into and stay in debt longer than they should. This new angle has the potential to spur on further research into the ways consumers can use debt more effectively and less expensively in service of the overarching goal of debt reduction.

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.

Context-Dependent Drivers of Discretionary Debt Decisions: Explaining Willingness to Borrow for Experiential Purchases

Abstract Mental accounting research suggests that consumers prefer borrowing for longer-lasting purchases in order to receive benefits from the purchases as they pay for them. In contrast, two sets of archival data and five lab studies show that consumers are more willing to borrow for experiential versus material purchases, even though experiential purchases tend to have a shorter physical duration. Further, framing the same purchase as more experiential than material increases willingness to borrow. This effect occurs because purchase timing is more important for experiential purchases—a function of consumers’ aversion to missing out on planned consumption. Thus, we moderate the proposed effect by varying whether the borrowing decision impacts planned consumption. Other differences between material and experiential purchases, such as scarcity or expected happiness, cannot similarly explain our results. Moreover, our conceptualization allows us to reconcile the apparent contradiction between the previous and current research by examining the relative impact of purchase-timing importance and payment-benefit duration matching in different contexts (i.e., “purchasing” and “source-of-funding” decisions).

Payment Rewards and Credit Card Debt: Experimental Evidence

We report on a controlled laboratory experiment in which participants make consumption, saving, and credit card repayment decisions when credit card purchases e

Knowing When to Spend: Unintended Financial Consequences of Earmarking to Encourage Savings

Maintaining savings is an important financial goal. Yet there are times when savings should be spent, such as when people face unavoidable costs, and spending their savings allows them to avoid high interest rate debt. Existing behavioral research has focused on consumer decisions between savings and discretionary spending and has proposed interventions to promote savings in these contexts. However, when spending is not discretionary, such interventions could risk exacerbating a pattern found in economic research in which people borrow high interest rate debt while maintaining savings that earn low levels of interest. To examine how mental accounting interacts with considerations of personal responsibility and guilt to contribute to this pattern, this article explores whether people spend their savings when they need money most: during emergencies. Six studies reveal that people's tendency to preserve savings by borrowing from a high interest rate credit option varies as a function of the savings’ intended use. Paradoxically, people are most likely to turn to high interest rate credit with the belief that doing so is the responsible option.

Leave Home without it? The Effects of Credit Card Debt and Available Credit on Spending

This research examines how credit card debt affects consumer spending. In five experimental and field studies, the authors demonstrate that outstanding credit card debt increases spending for consumers with high self-control. They also show that this effect can be eliminated by increasing the available credit on the credit card. Thus, when the available credit is low, consumers with greater self-control increase spending, but when the available credit is high, they reduce spending. The results extend the literature on goal violation and self-control and offer insights into consumer decision making and consumption patterns under conditions of debt.

The Effect of Credit on Spending Decisions: The Role of the Credit Limit and Credibility

The objective of the present research is to study consumer decisions to utilize a line of credit. The life-cycle hypothesis from economics argues that consumers should intertemporally reallocate their incomes over their life stream to maximize lifetime utility. One form of intertemporal allocation is to use past income (in the form of savings) in the future. A second form is the use of future income in the present. This can only be done if consumers have access to a temporary pool of money that they can draw from and replenish in the future—a function performed by consumer credit. However, our research reinforces prior findings that consumers are unable to correctly value their future incomes, and that they lack the cognitive capability to solve the intertemporal optimization problem required by the life-cycle hypothesis. Instead, we argue that consumers use information such as the credit limit as a signal of their future earnings potential. Specifically, if consumers have access to large amounts of credit, they are likely to infer that their lifetime income will be high and hence their willingness to use credit (and their spending) will also be high. Conversely, consumers who are granted lower amounts of credit are likely to infer that their lifetime income will be low and hence their spending will be lower. However, based on research in the area of consumer skepticism and inference making, we also argue for a moderating role of the credibility associated with the credit limit. Specifically, we argue that the above effect of credit availability would be particularly strong for consumers who believe that the credit limit credibly signals their future earnings potential (i.e., a naïve consumer who has limited experience with consumer credit). However, as consumers gain experience with credit, they start discounting credit availability as a predictor of their future and start questioning the validity of the process used to set the credit limit. Hence, with experience the effect of credit limit on the willingness to use credit should be attenuated. We test these predictions in five separate studies. In the first experimental study, we manipulate credit limit and credibility and pose subjects with a hypothetical purchase opportunity. Consistent with our prediction, credit limit impacted the propensity to spend, but only when the credibility was high. In the second experimental study, we replicate these findings even when subjects were given information about their expected future salaries, and also show that the credit limit influences their expectation of future earnings potential. In the third study, we show that the mere availability (and increase) of current liquidity cannot explain our findings. In the fourth study, we conduct a survey of consumers in which we measure a number of demographic characteristics and also ask them for their propensity to spend in a given purchase situation. In the fifth study we use the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) dataset, a triennial survey of U.S. families that is designed to provide detailed information on the use of financial services, spending behaviors, and selected demographic characteristics. Results from both studies 4 and 5 provide further support for our proposed framework—credit limits influence spending to a greater extent for consumers with lower credibility: younger consumers and less-educated consumers. Across all studies we achieved triangulation by using a variety of approaches (surveys and experiments), subjects types (young students and older consumers), nature of predictor variables (manipulated and measured), dependent measures (purchase likelihood, credit card balance, new charges), and methods of analysis (ANOVA and regression), and consistently found that increasing credit limits on a credit card increases spending, especially when the credibility of the limit is high. This paper joins a growing body of literature in marketing and behavioral decision theory that goes beyond the traditional domains of inquiry (e.g., product choice, effects of marketing mix variables) and focuses on consumer decisions relating to the appropriate use of income to finance consumption. Our framework differs from prior research on the effect of payment mechanisms on spending in two significant ways. First, we are interested in the effects of the availability of credit on spending, and not necessarily in the effect of the transaction format that is associated with each payment mechanism. Second, while prior research has studied the point-of-purchase and historic (i.e., prepurchase) effects of credit, the present research is concerned with the availability of credit in the future. Specifically, our framework is invariant to the current and prior usage of credit by the consumer.

Balancing Savings and Debt: Findings from an Online Experiment

Many consumers have savings and debt at the same time, and so are faced with a trade-off: how much debt to pay down versus how much savings to retain. This brie

“Repayment-by-Purchase” Increases Consumer Debt Repayment

This article tests the effect of a novel credit card payment format—repayment-by-purchase—on consumers’ payments toward credit card debt. In contrast to typical balance repayment, where consumers make repayments relative to a total amount owed, repayment-by-purchase prompts consumers to select items (e.g., a Starbucks coffee) or categories of purchase (e.g., restaurant and café purchases) and to make payments toward their related debt. A field experiment first suggests that customers who opted into repayment-by-purchase paid 12.18% more toward their statement balance than a control group. Subsequently, five lab experiments show that consumers repaying-by-purchase increase repayment by an average of 22.47% over typical balance repayment. Process evidence suggests that these differences may be driven by repayment-by-purchase's power to increase purchase salience, which in turns increases perceptions of progress toward reducing debt. Consistent with this theory, the effect of repayment-by-purchase on bill repayment emerges regardless of whether consumers repay durable versus nondurable goods, and for specific items or categories of purchases, as long as the bill uses labels that are concrete enough to raise past purchase salience.

The Red and the Black: Mental Accounting of Savings and Debt

In the standard economic account of consumer behavior the cost of a purchase takes the form of a reduction in future utility when expenditures that otherwise could have been made are forgone. The reality of consumer hedonics is different. When people make purchases, they often experience an immediate pain of paying, which can undermine the pleasure derived from consumption. The ticking of the taxi meter, for example, reduces one's pleasure from the ride. We propose a “double-entry” mental accounting theory that describes the nature of these reciprocal interactions between the pleasure of consumption and the pain of paying and draws out their implications for consumer behavior and hedonics. A central assumption of the model, which we call prospective accounting, is that consumption that has already been paid for can be enjoyed as if it were free and that the pain associated with payments made prior to consumption (but not after) is buffered by thoughts of the benefits that the payments will finance. Another important concept is coupling, which refers to the degree to which consumption calls to mind thoughts of payment, and vice versa. Some financing methods, such as credit cards, tend to weaken coupling, whereas others, such as cash payment, produce tight coupling. Our model makes a variety of predictions that are at variance with economic formulations. Contrary to the standard prediction that people will finance purchases to minimize the present value of payments, our model predicts strong debt aversion—that they should prefer to prepay for consumption or to get paid for work after it is performed. Such pay-before sequences confer hedonic benefits because consumption can be enjoyed without thinking about the need to pay for it in the future. Likewise, when paying beforehand, the pain of paying is mitigated by thoughts of future consumption benefits. Contrary to the economic prediction that consumers should prefer to pay, at the margin, for what they consume, our model predicts that consumers will find it less painful to pay for, and hence will prefer, flat-rate pricing schemes such as unlimited Internet access at a fixed monthly price, even if it involves paying more for the same usage. Other predictions concern spending patterns with cash, charge, or credit cards, and preferences for the earmarking of purchases. We test these predictions in a series of surveys and in a conjoint-like analysis that pitted our double-entry mental accounting model against a standard discounting formulation and another benchmark that did not incorporate hedonic interactions between consumption and payments. Our model provides a better fit of the data for 60% of the subjects; the discounting formulation provides a better fit for only 29% of the subjects (even when allowing for positive and negative discount rates). The pain of paying, we argue, plays an important role in consumer self-regulation, but is hedonically costly. From a hedonic perspective the ideal situation is one in which payments are tightly coupled to consumption (so that paying evokes thoughts about the benefits being financed) but consumption is decoupled from payments (so that consumption does not evoke thoughts about payment). From an efficiency perspective, however, it is important for consumers to be aware of what they are paying for consumption. This creates a tension between hedonic efficiency and what we call decision efficiency. Various institutional arrangements, such as financing of public parks through taxes or usage fees, play into this tradeoff. A producer developing a pricing structure for their product or service should be aware of these two conflicting objectives, and should try to devise a structure that reconciles them.

The Credit Card Debt Puzzle: The Role of Preferences, Credit Access Risk, and Financial Literacy

Abstract. We use the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to revisit what is termed the credit card debt puzzle: why consumers simultaneously co-hold high-interest credit card debt and low-interest assets that could be used to pay down this debt. Relative to individuals with no credit card debt but positive liquid assets, borrower-savers have very different perceptions of future credit access risk and use credit cards for precautionary motives. Moreover, changing perceptions about credit access risk are essential for predicting transitions among the two groups. Preferences and the composition of financial portfolios also play a role in these transitions.

Present-Biased Preferences and Credit Card Borrowing

Some individuals borrow extensively on their credit cards. This paper tests whether present-biased time preferences correlate with credit card borrowing. In a field study, we elicit individual time preferences with incentivized choice experiments, and match resulting time preference measures to individual credit reports and annual tax returns. The results indicate that present-biased individuals are more likely to have credit card debt, and to have significantly higher amounts of credit card debt, controlling for disposable income, other socio-demographics, and credit constraints. (JEL D12, D14, D91)

Consumer Misunderstanding of Credit Card Use, Payments, and Debt: Causes and Solutions

The authors identify several judgmental biases related to paying off credit card debt. Participants with stronger numerical skills made fewer errors, as did those who used the new statement format mandated by Congress in the CARD Act of 2009. Study 1 shows that people underestimate how long it takes to eliminate a debt when payments barely cover interest owed. Study 2 shows that less numerate people tend to underestimate the monthly payment required to pay off a debt in three years, whereas more numerate people tend to overestimate the payment. The newly revised statement required by the CARD Act substantially reduced these biases. However, even with the new statement, many people still underestimate required payments when still using the credit card. Study 3 identifies ambiguities in the revised statement that can lead to misjudgments about how much to pay on monthly bills. The authors recommend additional public policy actions to help cardholders understand the relationship between payments and debt elimination.

Credit Cards as Spending Facilitating Stimuli: A Conditioning Interpretation

Abstract. Four experiments and one study were conducted to test the hypothesis that stimuli associated with spending can elicit spending responses. In all

Reducing debt improves psychological functioning and changes decision-making in the poor

Significance The impact of chronic debt on the poor is psychological, not just financial. We hypothesize that chronic debt impairs psychological functioning and decision-making, contributing to the poverty trap. This is because debt is not considered fungible and is viewed as costly mental accounts that consume cognitive bandwidth. We test this using quasiexperimental evidence from a one-off, unanticipated debt-relief program worth several months’ household income. Comparing the poor before and after debt relief, those with more debt accounts paid off experienced greater improvements in cognitive functioning, reported less anxiety, and became less present-biased. These findings provide actionable evidence for poverty-alleviation policy. , We examine how chronic debt affects behavior by studying how a large, unanticipated debt-relief program affected psychological functioning and economic decision-making in beneficiaries. A charity granted low-income households debt relief worth up to Singapore dollars 5,000 (∼3 month’s household income). We exploited quasiexperimental variation in the structure of debt relief: For the same dollar amount of relief, some beneficiaries had more debt accounts eliminated, while others had fewer paid off. Comparing 196 beneficiaries before and after debt relief, and controlling for debt-relief amount, having an additional debt account paid off improves cognitive functioning by about one-quarter of a SD and reduces the likelihood of exhibiting anxiety by 11% and of present bias by 10%. To achieve the same effect on cognitive functioning of eliminating one debt account, a beneficiary must receive debt relief worth ∼1 month’s household income. There is no effect of debt-relief magnitude on anxiety and decision-making. We exclude training and calendar effects, debt-causing behaviors, and liquidity constraints as explanations. Instead, these results support the hypothesis that chronic debt impairs behavior because the mental-accounting costs of owing distinct debt accounts consume mental bandwidth. Poverty-alleviation policies aimed at the indebted poor should consider addressing mental accounting and bandwidth taxes.

Savers and Borrowers: Strategies of Personal Financial Management

Saving and borrowing are traditionally and stereotypically thought of as opposites, with different motivations and consequences. Through a questionnaire survey of economic position, practices, and attitudes, the present paper examined the relation between saving and borrowing among British respondents. While saving and borrowing were found to be determined by different economic, social, and psychological factors, they did not describe mutually exclusive strategies of financial management. Saving regularly could also be distinguished from having savings. In all, six strategies were identified (combining saving or not saving, borrowing or not borrowing, and having or not having savings). Each combination was found to have specific discriminating characteristics. Savers and borrowers were found to have different psychological motivations, seeing debt either as a failure or as a normal part of everyday life. Many people retained savings or carried on saving at the same time as having debts: they were found to feel more in control and optimistic about their financial position than those who had debts but no savings. A further group had neither debts nor savings: they adopted an inflexible approach to financial management. Each group of people with different financial management strategies was illustrated by a case study.