Buying without using - biases of German BahnCard buyers

Hendrik Schmale (1) , Thomas Ehrmann (2) , Alexander Dilger (3)

1 Institute of Strategic Management
2 Institute of Strategic Management
3 Institute for Organisational Economics

We use a large data set of German railway travellers to analyse the purchasing decision for fare-reducing BahnCards. We expect that this tariff choice is neither completely rational nor irrational, but bounded-rational in a meaningful way. Actually we predict a flat-rate bias, i.e. an under-use of their BahnCards by many customers. However, we estimate that this bias is not too large. The empirical results approve our hypotheses for the most part, especially for the more expensive BahnCard50, whereas the under-use of the cheaper BahnCard25 is so extensive that it is not worthwhile on average.

Mots clés: Social Sciences & Humanities

Domaines: Économie et finance quantitative [q-fin]

Hendrik Schmale, Thomas Ehrmann, Alexander Dilger. Buying without using - biases of German BahnCard buyers. Applied Economics, 2011, 45 (07), pp.933-941. ⟨10.1080/00036846.2011.613781⟩. ⟨hal-00744822⟩