THE EFFECT OF CREDIT CARD USAGE ON CONSUMER BEHAVIOR

Abstract

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