tailieunhanh - How Credit Card Payments Increase Unhealthy Food Purchases: Visceral Regulation of Vices

In other European countries such as Hungary and Latvia, this indirect cross-border credit was even more important in the run-up to the crisis. Much of this reflected the (interoffice) channelling of funds by foreign banks outside these countries to their subsidiaries in these countries (left-hand panels, dashed brown line), which in turn extended foreign currency loans to residents (right-hand panels). In the Baltic states combined, for example, credit extended by subsidiaries of foreign banks located in these countries accounted for 80% of total bank credit to non-banks, mostly euro-denominated | How Credit Card Payments Increase Unhealthy Food Purchases Visceral Regulation of Vices MANOJ THOMAS KALPESH KAUSHIK DESAI SATHEESHKUMAR SEENIVASAN Some food items that are commonly considered unhealthy also tend to elicit impulsive responses. The pain of paying in cash can curb impulsive urges to purchase such unhealthy food products. Credit card payments in contrast are relatively painless and weaken impulse control. Consequently consumers are more likely to buy unhealthy food products when they pay by credit card than when they pay in cash. Results from four studies support these hypotheses. Analysis of actual shopping behavior of 1 000 households over a period of 6 months revealed that shopping baskets have a larger proportion of food items rated as impulsive and unhealthy when shoppers use credit or debit cards to pay for the purchases study 1 . Follow-up experiments studies 2-4 show that the vice-regulation effect of cash payments is mediated by pain of payment and moderated by chronic sensitivity to pain of payment. Implications for consumer welfare and theories of impulsive consumption are discussed. The past two decades have witnessed a rapid increase in obesity among . consumers. According to the Center for Disease Control 34 of . adults are obese up from 23 in 1988. An additional 33 are overweight Ogden et al. 2006 . These results suggest that the consumption of unhealthy food is increasing and have prompted Manoj Thomas is assistant professor of marketing at Cornell University 353 Sage Hall Ithaca NY 14850 mkt27@ . Kalpesh Kaushik Desai is associate professor of marketing at State University of New York Binghamton kdesai@ . Satheeshkumar Seenivasan is a doctoral candidate at State University of New York Buffalo ss383 @ . This article has benefited from stimulating discussions of related research papers in the behavioral marketing journal club at Cornell University. The authors gratefully acknowledge Robert Frank