3.5 Debit Cards as a Method Behavioral Restraint of Because debit cards draw from liquidity and credit draw from debt, payment choice is poten- cards tially intertwined with household consumption decisions. The approach to modeling behavioralist economic behavior, as in Thaler(1985) and Prelec and Loewenstein(1998), raises the possibility that consumers with limited commitment power may choose to precommit to lower consumption by paying out of liquidity rather than debt. Zinman(2005) uses information on revolving credit card balances and other variables in the SCF to infer whether consumers appear to use debit cards as a means of behavioral restraint; he finds support instead for pecuniary motives for payment choice. The Restraint category included above in the reasons for using debit is of particular use in evaluating how consumers substitute between debit cards and credit cards. Notably, consumers 13We explore how the observable characteristics of each payment method(as opposed to self-reported drivers) affect substitution among payment methods in Borzekowski and Kiser(2006) The merchant decision not to accept credit cards is driven by the fact that interchange the fees paid by merchant banks to card-issuing banks, and borne by merchants are typically higher for credit cards than for debit cards. See, for example, Rochet and Tirole(2002), Gans and King(2003). Schwartz and Vincent(2003), Wright(2002), and Chakravorti and To(999), and Federal Reserve Board(2001) for discussions of the role of interchange fees in merchant acceptance