Lachlan Schomburgk

Lachlan Schomburgk

Consumer finance researcher and first author of the largest synthesis so far of whether paying without cash raises spending.

Who they are

Schomburgk is the first author, with Belli and Hoffmann, of "Less cash, more splash?", a meta-analysis published in the Journal of Retailing in 2024. It pooled 392 effect sizes from 71 papers and found what the authors call a small but significant cashless effect.

They found no evidence that features of the payment method itself changed the effect. The setting did: the effect was stronger for conspicuous consumption, weaker for pro-social spending, stronger in periods of economic growth, and it has weakened over time. The paper places the credit card effect between the large early laboratory results and later studies that found none.

Key papers

Schomburgk, L., Belli, A., & Hoffmann, A. O. I. (2024). "Less cash, more splash? A meta-analysis on the cashless effect." Journal of Retailing, 100(3), 382-403. doi:10.1016/j.jretai.2024.05.003.

Key ideas

See The Pain of Paying and Payment Coupling.

Sources

  1. Schomburgk, Belli and Hoffmann (2024), abstract read (ACU research bank), 12 October 2026.