“Buy Now, Pay Later” (BNPL) is a key innovation in consumer payments. It bundles the sale of a product with a subsidized loan, effectively offering lower prices to low-creditworthiness customers. BNPL thereby allows merchants to price-discriminate among customers with different willingness-to-pay. Consistent with a price-discrimination mechanism, we show that BNPL increases sales by 20%, driven by low-creditworthiness customers and products where market power is larger. We find that the benefits of offering BNPL significantly outweigh the costs for the merchant. Our findings help to explain the surge in popularity of BNPL in e-commerce around the world.

中文翻译：

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“先买后付”的经济效益：商家的观点

“先买后付”（BNPL） 是消费者支付领域的一项关键创新。它将产品销售与补贴贷款捆绑在一起，有效地为低信誉客户提供更低的价格。因此，BNPL 允许商家在具有不同支付意愿的客户之间进行价格歧视。与价格歧视机制一致，我们表明，在低信誉买家和市场力量更大的商品的推动下，BNPL 的销售额提高了 20%。我们发现，提供 BNPL 的好处大大超过了商家的成本。我们的研究结果有助于解释 BNPL 在全球电子商务中的受欢迎程度激增。