Title
Assisting mental accounting using smartphones: Increasing the salience of credit card transactions helps consumer reduce their spending
Abstract
Credit card-related over-spending represents an important issue for consumers. Over-spending arises in parts from reduced payment transparency compared to cash and other payment methods. Additionally, week-by-week credit card spending exhibits high variance even on an intrapersonal level, which makes it hard to intuitively learn from prior transactions and control one's spending. As mobile-mediated information systems have been proven effective in delivering behavior change interventions, this study investigates the efficacy of using a novel smartphone application that increases the salience of credit card transactions to help consumers control their cashless payments better and ultimately spend less. We implemented a goal-setting feature and provided weekly goal attainment feedback highlighting ordinary, exceptional, or both types of purchases. This work was conducted as a field experiment, studying a large sample of credit card consumers in the wild over several months, which yielded a significant reduction in spending with unobtrusive interventions. It further highlights the importance of including exceptional purchases in households' spending budgets and discusses how people adjusted their consumption to lower their expenditures.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1016/j.chb.2020.106504
COMPUTERS IN HUMAN BEHAVIOR
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Credit card transaction salience,Exceptional purchases,Transaction rehearsal,Spending feedback,Financial literacy,Field experiment
Journal
113
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0747-5632
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Johannes Huebner1363.38
Elgar Fleisch273895.07
Alexander Ilic312921.71