Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/107231 
Year of Publication: 
2014
Series/Report no.: 
Working Papers No. 14-1
Publisher: 
Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Boston, MA
Abstract: 
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 Choice, we find that only a very small fraction of transactions received a cash or debit card discount, and even fewer were subjected to a credit card surcharge. Transactions at gasoline stations were more likely to receive either cash discounts or credit card surcharges than transactions in other sectors. Larger-value transactions were somewhat more likely to receive a discount, although the effect is small when controlling for merchant sector. There is little evidence that merchants have started taking advantage of their new flexibility to influence consumers' payment choice by either discounting or surcharging based on the payment method.
Subjects: 
payment choice
merchant steering
cash and debit discount
credit card surcharge
JEL: 
D14
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size
455.31 kB





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.