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...

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 When a consumer pays by card, the merchant’s bank pays to the consumer’s bank an interchange fee. In this article, we construct a general model of a card platform that unifies the literature on interchange fees. We enrich the existing frameworks by analyzing the choice of the...

Abstract This paper considers the organization of a single (domestic) payment system. When card issuers that are members of a payment system set their fees individually, this gives rise to a free-riding problem, as in providing access to different customers, card issuers are complements from the...

Abstract This paper presents a first estimation of the tourist test threshold for interchange fees that makes Peruvian small merchants indifferent between accepting cash and debit cards at the point of sale. We use the tourist test model (initially proposed by Rochet and Tirole), including tax...

Significant attention worldwide has been paid to the regulation of credit card interchange fees. In part, this attention has followed concerns expressed about the level of these fees in Europe, the U.S. and Australia. The Reserve Bank of Australia recently conducted an extensive inquiry into the...

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,...