Mobile Payment Method and Heterogeneous Offline Consumer Behavior
（Renmin University of China，Beijing100872，China）
Abstract：The driving effect of China's consumption on economic growth has become gradually prominent，but the overall consumer demand is still relatively insufficient. Recently，the booming mobile payment under the support of China's huge market and consumer heterogeneity provides a new perspective for research. According to double- entry mental account theory，the mechanism of mobile payment on consumption includs payment resource and payment process. In terms of payment source， mobile payment is associated with consumer debt and can be treated as a mental account；in the terms of payment process， compared with other payment methods，mobile payment has lower transparency and lower degrees of coupling，which will reduce consumers' payment pain，improve the overall pleasure of consumption and stimulate personal consumption. Therefore， based on the unique consumer micro- data from the chained retailers in 2014- 2019，a difference- in- difference model and a propensity score matching with a difference-in-difference approach are applied to study the impact of mobile payment on offline consumption and heterogeneous consumer behaviors. Results show that mobile payment significantly accelerates consumption and this impact has gradually increased over time. Besides，mobile payment has different effects on heterogeneous consumers，with greater impact on women and consumers with low to medium incomes. Therefore，mobile payment plays an important role in stimulating heterogeneous consumption，promoting the development of retail enterprises and the economy. Relevant policies should guide and regulate the development of payment platforms and reduce the related risk. In addition，physical stores can actively apply new methods such as mobile payments to stimulate consumption and identify heterogeneous consumers and boost China's consumption from the micro level，such as digital operation and precision marketing.
Key words：mobile payment；heterogeneous consumers；consumer behavior