Research Article
How to Design a Composite Reward Program for Credit Card Users Based on Prospect Theory and Mental Accounting
1 Yonsei University, 2 Chungnam National University
Published: January 2017 · Vol. 21, No. 1 · pp. 185-208
Full Text
Abstract
Credit card companies provide a variety of benefits to attract consumers, and the most typical reward program would be reward mileage. However, consumers prefer cash-back(or instant discount) to reward mileage, so the portion of cash-back reward program tend to increase, compared to reward mileage program. On the other hand, one of credit card companies’ concerns is cherry-pickers that are interested in promoted items and benefits such as instant discount and cash-back. The reward mileage program is effective to prevent cherry-pickers, so credit card companies face a dilemma of making choice between cash-back and reward mileage. Based on the prospect theory(Kahneman and Tversky 1979) and mental accounting(Thaler 1985), this paper proposed a composite reward program – mixing cash-back and reward mileage. Through 2 experiments, we examined consumers’ preference about reward programs (instant discount, cash-back, reward mile, and composite regard program). In Experiment 1, preference toward reward mileage was significantly less than that toward others(instant discount, cash- back, composite reward program). In Experiment 2, we found that because of the status quo bias, consumer preference decreased when companies changed from instant discounts to reward mileage, compared with keeping current programs. When the changed program is the composite reward program, rather than reward mileage, the negative impact on consumer preference was relatively less. Also, these effects were mediated by usefulness and convenience. Reward mileage program is an important way to prevent cherry-pickers, so these results imply that the composite reward program could hold consumers without scarifying consumer satisfaction.
