Credit cards provide benefits to consumers and merchants not provided by other payment instruments as evidenced by their explosive growth in the number and value of transactions over the last 20 years. Recently, credit card networks have come under scrutiny from regulators and antitrust...

In this article, we construct a model to study competing payment networks, where networks offer differentiated products in terms of benefits to consumers and merchants. We study market equilibria for a variety of market structures: duopolistic competition and cartel, symmetric and asymmetric...

Payment cards continue to replace cash and checks in advanced economies. Along with the growth of payment card transactions has come greater scrutiny by public authorities of certain payment network rules along with the level of certain fees. This article reviews the growing payment card...