Cash or Card: Consumer Perceptions of Payment Modes - Scholarly ...

supply evidence that among college students in the US ownership and use are not gender
dependent (see Carpenter and Moore, 2008). There does however appear to be consistent
evidence that income and education influence credit card ownership and use (Klee 2004; Lee
and Kwon 2002).
2.5.1.1: Credit Cards and Purchase Behaviour
Credit card logo effects
Research efforts went beyond identifying who uses credit cards to look at how the possession
of these cards influences purchasing behaviour (Feinberg, 1986; Hirschman, 1979; Soman,
2001, 2003; Prelec and Semester, 2001). Hirschman (1979) conducted a survey of consumer
shopping in different branches of a department store chain and found that using a bank-issued
or store-issued credit card was positively related to higher expenditures. Feinberg (1986)
examined the size of tips left by credit card and cash paying customers at a restaurant and
found that on average credit card customers left larger tips. He extended this result to an
experimental setting by having subjects examine a mock catalogue featuring pictures of
various unbranded consumer products (dress, tent, man’s sweater, lamp, typewriter and
chess). Half the subjects viewed the book in the presence of a credit card stimulus and the
other half viewed the book in the absence of any such stimuli. When asked to assess the
amount of money they would be willing to spend, respondents in credit card condition
boosted their hypothetical willingness to pay by 50-200% relative to the estimates of a
control group. Feinberg (1986) offered two theoretical explanations to account for his
findings: classical conditioning and a weapons effect. He explained that the credit card logo
is associated with spending and so influences spending. The second explanation is somewhat
curious as he deems the credit card logo as a stimulus that encourages aggressive (perhaps
risk type behaviour). Shimp and Moody (2000) replicated the Fienberg 1986 study but found
that a credit card logo did not affect spending behaviour.
Other attempts to replicate Feinberg’s (1986) work also deliver mixed results. His own work
in 1990 failed to replicate the findings of his earlier study and the Hunt, Florsheim,
Chatterjee, and Kernan (1990) study that tested for materialism effects found no effect of the
credit card symbol on price evaluations, irrespective of materialism levels. However McCall
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