  We find it is common for consumers who are not in financial distress to make
credit card payments at or close to the minimum. This pattern is difficult to
reconcile with economic factors but can be explained by minimum payment
information presented to consumers acting as an anchor that weighs payments
down. Building on Stewart (2009), we conduct a hypothetical credit card payment
experiment to test an intervention to de-anchor payment choices. This
intervention effectively stops consumers selecting payments at the contractual
minimum. It also increases their average payments, as well as shifting the
distribution of payments. By de-anchoring choices from the minimum, consumers
increasingly choose the full payment amount - which potentially seems to act as
a target payment for consumers. We innovate by linking the experimental
responses to survey responses on financial distress and to actual credit card
payment behaviours. We find that the intervention largely increases payments
made by less financially-distressed consumers. We are also able to evaluate the
potential external validity of our experiment and find that hypothetical
responses are closely related to consumers' actual credit card payments.
