Estimate the prevalence of merchant payment steering from transaction receipt data

Thomas M. Menino Convention & Exhibition Center 

We take advantage of a natural experiment implemented at October 2022 around policy intervention which allows merchants to surcharge for credit card transaction. We present empirical evidence on merchant surcharge and payment acceptance decisions measured by indirect sampling approach. We employ the data integration approach for the indirectly sampled data under the bipartite graph (i.e., consumer-merchant network linked by transactions). Compared to the existing weight share method, our proposed weights do neither require knowing the inclusion probabilities of directly sampled units, nor successors' and ancestors' knowledge of the bipartite graph. In a simulation, we assess the effectiveness of our weights in terms of bias and variance.

Indirect sampling

Non-probability survey

Data integration 

Survey Research Methods Section