2013 Series • No. 13–13
Research Department Working Papers
How Many Cards Do You Use?
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."