In October 2011, new rules governing debit card interchange fees became effective in the United States. These rules limit the maximum permissible interchange fee that an issuer can charge merchants for a debit card transaction. This paper provides simple calculations that identify the...

This paper studies the economic cost-benefit analysis behind the decision by the United Kingdom on how to implement its Faster Payments Service (FPS), which allows consumers and businesses to rapidly transfer money between bank accounts, and draws implications for the U.S. payments system.

The paper investigates the reasons why person-to-person electronic funds transfers are still not very common in the United States compared with practices in many other countries. The paper also describes recent enhancements to online and mobile banking that provide account holders with low-cost...

The author constructs a theoretical model to examine the effects of an inherent conflict of interest between a seller of a house and the real estate broker hired by the seller. The model is then used to calibrate the broker's commission rates that would maximize the seller's expected gain. The...

The authors characterize equilibrium and efficient modes of production by comparing nested (vertical) outsourcing with horizontal outsourcing. Nested outsourcing is found to be inefficient unless the cost of monitoring outsourced production lines increases sharply with the number of...

In 2010, the Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a lawsuit against the credit card networks American Express, MasterCard, and Visa for alleged antitrust violations. We evaluate the extent to which the recently proposed settlement between the DOJ and Visa and MasterCard (henceforth, "Proposed...

We introduce three types of consumer recognition: identity recognition, asymmetric preference recognition, and symmetric preference recognition. We characterize price equilibria and compare profits, consumer surplus, and total welfare. Asymmetric preference recognition enhances profits compared...

This paper seeks to discover whether U.S. merchants are using their recently granted freedom to offer price discounts and other incentives to steer customers to pay with methods that are less costly to merchants. Using evidence of merchant steering based on the 2012 Diary of Consumer Payment...

The terms "window shopping" and "showrooming" refer to the activity in which potential buyers visit a brick-and-mortar store to examine a product but end up either not buying it or buying the product from an online retailer. This paper analyzes potential buyers who differ in their preference for...

This paper investigates how buyers allocate their spending among debit, credit, and prepaid cards. Using the 2012 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice, I show that consumers tend to concentrate the majority of their transactions and a large value of their transactions on a single type of card. The...