IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/pal/jofsma/v24y2019i1d10.1057_s41264-019-00063-8.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The effect of promotional interest rates on customer borrowing and payment behavior in the credit card industry

Author

Listed:
  • B. P. S. Murthi

    (The University of Texas at Dallas)

  • Marina Girju

    (DePaul University)

  • Erin Steffes

    (Towson University)

Abstract

Credit card companies typically offer limited-time teaser interest rates [also known as promotional annual percentage rates (APRs)] to attract new customers. Firms hope that the promotional APRs will encourage consumers not only to open accounts, but also to transfer balances from other credit cards, revolve credit card balances, or take cash advances, each of which would lead to an increase in the firm’s profit. It is important to understand the effect of the promotional rates on customer behavior. Important research questions include: Does the lure of a low APR increase indebtedness of a customer over the short run and the long run? Between two segments—needy and opportunistic customers—which group is more likely to take advantage of the offer? A related important question for firms is whether the low APRs increase the financial risk (i.e., probability of delinquency or the probability of default of a customer) thus imposing costs of monitoring and balance recovery on the firm. Given the limited published research on these topics, we take a closer look at some of the behavioral patterns associated with the offer of promotional APRs in this study.

Suggested Citation

  • B. P. S. Murthi & Marina Girju & Erin Steffes, 2019. "The effect of promotional interest rates on customer borrowing and payment behavior in the credit card industry," Journal of Financial Services Marketing, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 24(1), pages 11-20, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:jofsma:v:24:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1057_s41264-019-00063-8
    DOI: 10.1057/s41264-019-00063-8
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1057/s41264-019-00063-8
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1057/s41264-019-00063-8?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Brito, Dagobert L & Hartley, Peter R, 1995. "Consumer Rationality and Credit Cards," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 103(2), pages 400-433, April.
    2. Stefano DellaVigna & Ulrike Malmendier, 2004. "Contract Design and Self-Control: Theory and Evidence," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 119(2), pages 353-402.
    3. Sumit Agarwal & Bhashkar Mazumder, 2013. "Cognitive Abilities and Household Financial Decision Making," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association, vol. 5(1), pages 193-207, January.
    4. David B. Gross & Nicholas S. Souleles, 2002. "Do Liquidity Constraints and Interest Rates Matter for Consumer Behavior? Evidence from Credit Card Data," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 117(1), pages 149-185.
    5. D. J. Hand & W. E. Henley, 1997. "Statistical Classification Methods in Consumer Credit Scoring: a Review," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 160(3), pages 523-541, September.
    6. Gathergood, John, 2012. "Self-control, financial literacy and consumer over-indebtedness," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 33(3), pages 590-602.
    7. repec:bla:jindec:v:50:y:2002:i:4:p:475-92 is not listed on IDEAS
    8. Thomas, Lyn C., 2000. "A survey of credit and behavioural scoring: forecasting financial risk of lending to consumers," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 16(2), pages 149-172.
    9. Scholnick, Barry & Massoud, Nadia & Saunders, Anthony & Carbo-Valverde, Santiago & Rodríguez-Fernández, Francisco, 2008. "The economics of credit cards, debit cards and ATMs: A survey and some new evidence," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 32(8), pages 1468-1483, August.
    10. Victor Stango, 2002. "Pricing with Consumer Switching Costs: Evidence from the Credit Card Market," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 50(4), pages 475-492, December.
    11. Insik Min & Jong-Ho Kim, 2003. "Modeling Credit Card Borrowing: A Comparison of Type I and Type II Tobit Approaches," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 70(1), pages 128-143, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Conor B. Hamill & Raad Khraishi & Simona Gherghel & Jerrard Lawrence & Salvatore Mercuri & Ramin Okhrati & Greig A. Cowan, 2023. "Agent-based Modelling of Credit Card Promotions," Papers 2311.01901, arXiv.org, revised Nov 2023.
    2. Cesar Leandro, Julio & Botelho, Delane, 2022. "Consumer over-indebtedness: A review and future research agenda," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 145(C), pages 535-551.
    3. Hway-Boon Ong & Lee-Lee Chong, 2023. "The effect of cashless payments on the internet and mobile banking," Journal of Financial Services Marketing, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 28(1), pages 178-188, March.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Scholnick, Barry & Massoud, Nadia & Saunders, Anthony & Carbo-Valverde, Santiago & Rodríguez-Fernández, Francisco, 2008. "The economics of credit cards, debit cards and ATMs: A survey and some new evidence," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 32(8), pages 1468-1483, August.
    2. Lawrence Santucci, 2015. "A tale of two vintages: credit limit management before and after the CARD act and Great Recession," Consumer Finance Institute discussion papers 15-1, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
    3. Abbas Valadkhani & Sajid Anwar & Amir Arjonandi, 2012. "How to capture the full extent of price stickiness in credit card interest rates?," Economics Working Papers wp12-02, School of Economics, University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia.
    4. Massoud, Nadia & Saunders, Anthony & Scholnick, Barry, 2011. "The cost of being late? The case of credit card penalty fees," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 7(2), pages 49-59, June.
    5. Francisco Gomes & Michael Haliassos & Tarun Ramadorai, 2021. "Household Finance," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 59(3), pages 919-1000, September.
    6. Agarwal, Sumit & Presbitero, Andrea & Silva, Andre F. & Wix, Carlo, 2022. "Who Pays For Your Rewards? Redistribution in the Credit Card Market," CEPR Discussion Papers 17733, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    7. Jawaid Ahmed Qureshi & Sana Baqai & Muhammad Asif Qureshi, 2018. "Consumers' Attitude towards Usage of Debit and Credit Cards: Evidences from the Digital Economy of Pakistan," International Journal of Economics and Financial Issues, Econjournals, vol. 8(5), pages 220-228.
    8. Daniel Grodzicki & Alexei Alexandrov & Özlem Bedre-Defolie & Sergei Koulayev, 2023. "Consumer Demand for Credit Card Services," Journal of Financial Services Research, Springer;Western Finance Association, vol. 63(3), pages 273-311, June.
    9. G. Gulsun Akin & Ahmet Faruk Aysan & Sezgim Dasdogen & Levent Yildiran, 2019. "Credit Card Debt: Nescience or Necessity?," Working Papers 1315, Economic Research Forum, revised 21 Aug 2019.
    10. Yiwei Dou & Geng Li & Joshua Ronen, 2019. "Does Price Regulation Affect Competition? Evidence from Credit Card Solicitations," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2019-018, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    11. Singh, Shweta & Murthi, B.P.S. & Steffes, Erin, 2013. "Developing a measure of risk adjusted revenue (RAR) in credit cards market: Implications for customer relationship management," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 224(2), pages 425-434.
    12. Jonathan Zinman, 2004. "Why use debit instead of credit? Consumer choice in a trillion-dollar market," Staff Reports 191, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    13. Insik Min & Jong‐Ho Kim, 2003. "Modeling Credit Card Borrowing: A Comparison of Type I and Type II Tobit Approaches," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 70(1), pages 128-143, July.
    14. John Y. Campbell, 2016. "Restoring Rational Choice: The Challenge of Consumer Financial Regulation," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 106(5), pages 1-30, May.
    15. Dinh, K. & Kleimeier, S., 2006. "Credit scoring for Vietnam's retail banking market : implementation and implications for transactional versus relationship lending," Research Memorandum 012, Maastricht University, Maastricht Research School of Economics of Technology and Organization (METEOR).
    16. Weida Kuang & Chunlin Liu & Qun Wu & Hongchao Zeng, 2021. "How do Interest Rate Changes Affect Mortgage Curtailments? Evidence from China," Real Estate Economics, American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, vol. 49(S2), pages 395-427, September.
    17. Ryan R. Brady, 2011. "Consumer Credit, Liquidity, And The Transmission Mechanism Of Monetary Policy," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 49(1), pages 246-263, January.
    18. Lukas, Moritz & Nöth, Markus, 2022. "Voluntary minimum repayments and borrower heterogeneity: Evidence from revolving consumer credit," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 135(C).
    19. Li, Jiayi & Luo, Sumei & Zhou, Guangyou, 2023. "Electronic payment, natural environment and household consumption: Evidence from China household finance survey," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 85(C).
    20. Thomas Wainwright, 2011. "Elite Knowledges: Framing Risk and the Geographies of Credit," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 43(3), pages 650-665, March.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:jofsma:v:24:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1057_s41264-019-00063-8. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.