Low Response Rate from Merchants? Sample and Ask Consumers! An Application of Indirect Sampling Under a Consumer-Merchant Bipartite Network

Under the consumer-merchant bipartite network, we apply the indirect sampling approach to estimate merchant payment acceptance through a consumer payment diary. The records of in-person transactions in the consumer diary provide both the merchant sample via consumer-merchant linkages, and the merchant acceptance via consumers’ responses. Among merchants receiving multiple transactions, we show that the derived payment acceptance from the consumer reporting is high quality in terms of very few conflicts between usage and perception, and within perceptions. Furthermore, we show the necessity of weight adjustment to correct for the non-recorded-merchant bias due to the shorter duration of the diary (i.e., constrained to maximum three days). Finally, we compare our indirect sampling estimates to the ones from a direct sampling survey, and we find the results align well, which supports our indirect sampling application in terms of alleviating merchant response burden and reducing survey operation cost.