This paper examines the relationship between competition and price discrimination in the market for mailing lists. More specifically, we examine whether sellers are more likely to segregate consumers by offering a menu of quality choices (second-degree price discrimination) and/or offering...

In many countries around the world, electronic card-based payments have been replacing older types of payments at a rapid rate. In the United States, use of both debit cards and credit cards has been rising rapidly, while check volumes have been declining. The increased use of electronic payment...

Dramatic changes have occurred in the U.S. payment system over the past two decades, most notably an explosion in electronic card-based payments. Not surprisingly, this shift has been accompanied by a series of policy debates, all of which hinge critically on understanding consumer behavior at...

Debit card use at the point of sale has grown dramatically in recent years in the U.S., and now exceeds the number of credit card transactions. However, many questions remain regarding patterns of debit card use, consumer preferences when using debit, and how consumers might respond to explicit...

This paper examines the relationship between multimarket bank presence and the profitability (and therefore viability) of small, single-market banks. We find that increased presence of multimarket banks is associated with a significant reduction in the profitability of small, single-market banks...

This paper uses a large sample of individual banking organizations, observed from 1996 to 2003, to investigate the characteristics that made them more likely to be acquired. We use a definition of acquisition that we consider preferable to that used in much of the previous literature, and we...

It is frequently claimed that high ATM surcharges actually attract customers to the banks that impose them, particularly if they operate large ATM networks. By exploiting as natural experiments two events associated with the lifting of surcharge bans in Iowa and in the states that neighbor Iowa,...

This paper investigates depository institutions' decisions whether or not to impose surcharges (direct usage fees) on non-depositors who use their ATMs. In addition to documenting patterns of surcharging, we examine motives for surcharging, including both direct generation of fee revenue and the...

In this paper, we examine the role of market characteristics in explaining the much discussed phenomenon of growth in the number of banking institution branches over time, and the much less discussed phenomenon of decline in the size of the average branch. We note first that substitution of bank...