Share the happiness

Abstract

Due to the technological developments over the past year´s payment methods have advanced significantly. This thesis aims to investigate how different payment methods affect consumers' behaviour. Today, consumers can choose to pay with several different payment methods, where many of these payment methods have been proven to make the consumers increasingly psychologically detached from the event of spending money (Shah, Eisenkraft, Bettman & Chartrand, 2015). The society is moving towards a “cashless economy”, and it is therefore of high relevance to understand how different payment methods influence how much we value and feel psychologically connected to what we spend our money on (Shah et al., 2015). In addition to affecting our willingness to share, different forms of payments also impact our prosocial behaviour (e.g., donation amounts). Being prosocial is a personal characteristic in which a person wants to do things for others without expecting something in return (Bradley, Laurence & Ferguson, 2018). Since mobile payments have become an increasingly common way of paying, our research will contribute to understanding how the use of smart technology impacts individuals’ prosociality. In this paper we investigated if prosociality is affected by different payment methods, and if this connection is strengthened by the mediating effect of pain of paying and the perceived value of receiving a gift from e.g., a friend or family. This effect is measured by looking at the amount we are willing to share with others, in the form of a gift. In order to check for other variables that enhance prosociality, we looked at several moderators such as observability of the act, the attitudes towards mobile payments and attitudes towards prosociality. Two studies were conducted to explore if mobile payments make people more generous when treating their friends, distinguishing between mobile payments and gift cards or credit cards. Previous studies have found a clear difference between the use of cash and credit card, while the distinction between credit card and mobile payment has not yet been studied as extensively. In conclusion, our studies find no statistical difference in the levels of prosocial gifting between individuals that use mobile payments relative to gift card and credit card. In addition, the paper gives thorough insights about which mechanisms affect our prosociality.