Working Paper

How many cards do you use?

Abstract: This paper investigates how buyers allocate their spending among debit, credit, and prepaid cards. Using the 2012 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice, I show that consumers tend to concentrate the majority of their transactions and a large value of their transactions on a single type of card. The paper also investigates whether buyers concentrate their spending on one of the card networks, a behavior known as \"single-homing.\"

Keywords: payment card use; choice of payment cards; multi-homing; single-homing;

JEL Classification: D14;

Bibliographic Information

Provider: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston

Part of Series: Working Papers

Publication Date: 2013-12-31

Number: 13-13

Pages: 33 pages