This short article explains why merchants accept expensive payment cards when merchants are Cournot competitors. The same acceptance rule as the Hotelling price competition model of Rochet and Tirole (2002) is derived. Unlike the models used in the existing literature, in the Cournot setting...

Abstract Payment cards have been a perennial source of debate among economists. That debate received additional fodder in 2010 with passage in the US of the Durbin Amendment, which targets debit card interchange fees. I assess the Durbin Amendment, testing the interchange fee cap it imposes...

Abstract Since many merchants charge consumers a single price regardless of payment method, payment card rewards programs may cause some consumers to indirectly subsidize others. From our consumer survey, we find that higher income consumers received a higher rewards rate, and from merchant...

The paper offers a roadmap to the current economic thinking concerning interchange fees. After describing the fundamental externalities inherent in payment systems and analysing merchant resistance to interchange fee increases and the associations' determination of this fee, it derives the...

A payment instrument that disproportionately charges merchants (as with high interchange) can take business from others that offer the two-sided customer better deals. This competitive bias arises because merchants internalize cardholders' benefits (even without merchant competition). Use of an...

This paper presents models that explain why merchants accept payment cards even when the fees they face exceed the transactional benefits they receive from a card transaction. The prevalent assumption - merchants accept cards only when they earn positive net transactional benefits - holds only...

The paper investigates, in a non-technical fashion, the economic determinants of interchange fees in payment card systems and the potential need for their regulation. Among other things, it demonstrates that the proposal for a cost-based regulation of interchange fees relies on an erroneous,...

The No Surcharge Rule (NSR) prevents merchants from charging more to consumers who pay by card versus other means ("cash"). We consider a payment network facing local monopolist merchants that serve two consumer groups, card users and cash users. Unlike in prior work, transaction quantities are...

Open payment card networks typically coordinate the activities of thousands of financial institutions that issue cards, millions of retail locations that accept them, and several hundred million consumers that use them. This coordination can include the collective setting of certain prices and...

This paper makes the case that the structure of payment systems is such that, in contrast to competition in normal markets, private incentives can encourage activities and pricing that do not necessarily improve social welfare. Furthermore, while there is usually a reasonable presumption that...