This paper seeks to discover whether U.S. merchants are using their recently granted freedom to offer price discounts and other incentives to steer customers to pay with methods that are less costly to merchants. Using evidence of merchant steering based on the 2012 Diary of Consumer Payment...

The 2015 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice (SCPC) was implemented using a new longitudinal panel, the Understanding America Study (UAS), and results are not yet comparable to the 2008–2014 SCPC. In 2015, U.S. consumers made 68.9 payments per month. Debit cards remained the most popular payment...

Why do US consumers pay their bills the way they do? Using data from a recent diary of consumer payment behavior, we find that the type of bill consumers are paying and how they are paying (online or automatically) are important factors in determining the payment method, in addition to the...

Shy and Stavins (2015) showed that in 2012 U.S. merchants rarely took advantage of their recent freedom to differentiate prices based on the method of payment use. The authors of this paper use new data from the 2015 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice to analyze price discounts and surcharges...

Even though security of payments has long been identified as an important aspect of the consumer payment experience, recent literature fails to appropriately assess the extent of social spillovers among payment users. We test for the existence and importance of such spillovers by analyzing...

Payment transformation has generated a shift from paper to cards and electronic payments in the United States, but there is also a large degree of heterogeneity among consumers in how they pay. We present factors affecting consumer payment behavior, show data on how consumers pay in the United...

We use new data from the 2015 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice to analyze price discounts and surcharges based on the payment method used for transactions. We examine consumer preferences for specific payment instruments and test whether consumer demand for payment instruments is price elastic....

Despite the introduction of new technology and new ways to make payments, the Survey of Consumer Payment Choice (SCPC) finds that consumer payment behavior has remained stable over the past decade. In the 10 years of the survey, debit cards, cash, and credit cards consistently have been the most...

Previous research has found that perceptions of payment security affect consumers' use of payment instruments. We test whether the Target data breach in 2013 was associated with a change in consumers' perceptions of the security of credit cards and debit cards and with subsequent changes in...