THE EFFECT OF CREDIT CARD USE ON CONSUMER BEHAVIOR

Abstract

While the credit cards, which is a modern payment instrument, is an important tool for producers and sellers in order to exist in the market and to maintain their strength in today's intense competitive environment, it is a tool for consumers to benefit from prestige, short-term cash credit, not needing to carry money, opportunity for installment shopping and late payment advantage. Widespreading of installment applications on credit cards continuously changes the consumer behaviors having a dynamic structure. Even though the purchasing decision in consumer behaviors starts with the emergence of a need, the credit cards presented by banks to their users like a gift effect consumer behaviors by expeditiously replacing cash, enabling consumers to buy any product easily, providing convenience in purchasing transactions, and making the life easier. Accordingly, consumers may move away from exhibiting rational behaviors. In this study, the relationship between credit card usage and household expenditures was researched with the co-integration bound testing approach ARDL (autoregressive distributed lag) by using quarterly data of 2002-2015 periods. According to the obtained findings, a long-term relationship with the credit card and the amount of the transaction volume per credit card was determined. In error-correction model, it was observed that the short-term deviations disappeared between the series acting together in long term.