pThe credit card market has evolved into what is defined here as a "peacock market." Analogous to extravagant and inefficient male peacock displays, a "peacock market" has developed to become dominated by elaborate signals that are no longer connected in a meaningful way to price, quality, or...

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...

Recent decisions by the Spanish national competition authority (TDC) mandate payment systems to include only two costs when setting their domestic multilateral interchange fees (MIF): a fixed processing cost and a variable cost for the risk of fraud. This artificial lowering of MIFs will not...