Automatic payments are increasingly common. The psychologies of the prominent of number, defaults and inattention combine to create an unexpected side effect of automatic payments. We see that credit card holders set a default automatic payment to match their modal repayment behavior. For those...

Using data from multiple card issuers, we show that the most common penalty fee type incurred by credit card holders – late payment fees – declines sharply over the first few months of card life. This phenomenon is wholly due to some consumers adopting automatic payments after a late payment...

In the attraction effect, adding a dominated third option to a choice set of two options can reverse the preference for the original two options, and even increase one of the option's choice share. This constitutes a violation of the axioms of regularity and independence from irrelevant...

We explore the effects of round number preferences in credit card payments. Payments at round numbers are very common: 70% of manual non-full credit card payments are at round numbers. Using minimum payment amounts as a natural experiment for the lower bound on payments, we show stickiness in...