Merchant steering of consumer payment choice: lessons learned from consumer surveys

Oz Shy and Joanna Stavins

No 13-1, Research Data Report from Federal Reserve Bank of Boston

Abstract: Recent policy changes allow merchants to influence consumers? choice of payment instruments by offering price discounts and other incentives. This report describes lessons learned from using consumer survey responses to assess whether merchants tried to influence buyers? choice of payment method. To measure the effects of these recent policy changes, we included questions about merchant steering in pilot versions of a new diary survey of U.S. consumers. Our findings are inconclusive because some respondents interpreted the questions differently from the way we intended. This report aims to explain why the diary survey failed to deliver the desired results, and to suggest better ways to use surveys to evaluate the effects of policy changes in the future.

Keywords: Debit cards; Credit cards; Consumer surveys; Payment systems; Consumers' preferences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mkt
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/rdr/2013/rdr1301.pdf (application/pdf)
http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/rdr/2013/rdr1301.htm (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: Merchant Steering of Consumer Payment Choice: Lessons Learned From Consumer Surveys (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedbdr:13-1

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Research Data Report from Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Spozio ().