| dc.description.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. | en_US |
