We analyse a card payment system to assess the economic impact of the interchange fee. This fee is paid by the bank of the merchant, the acquirer, to the bank of the consumer, the issuer. We build up a mode in order to explore whether the interchange fee can enhance the participation to the...

In framework of Rochet and Tirole (2011), I allow for partial merchant internalization and study how MIT threshold is related to levels of inter-change fee that maximize various components of social welfare. I find that cost absorption on the side of issuers and merchant heterogeneity each bias...

This paper uses the standard economic framework for designing government regulations to evaluate the Federal Reserve Board's proposed cost-based price caps for debit card interchange fees. We argue that the Board has not prepared an economically sound diagnosis of the problem that it is trying...

Merchant fees and reward programs generate an implicit monetary transfer to credit card users from non-card (or "cash") users because merchants generally do not set differential prices for card users to recoup the costs of fees and rewards. On average, each cash-using household pays $149 to...