Consumers pay for hundreds of goods and services each year, but across households and across goods, consumers do not choose to pay the same way. This paper posits that these differences depend in part on consumers' propensity to adopt new technologies, and depend in part on the nature of the...

The payment industry is undergoing significant change. Consolidations among payment networks and processors have been seen in every payment service area and technological advances provide incentives for even larger financial institutions to outsource their transaction processing. As a result, a...

Pricing in two-sided markets has not been fully understood yet. Especially, investigations of how competition in these markets affects the price structure or levels are still underway. This paper takes the payment card industry as an example of two-sided markets and examines whether two...

Payment card rewards programs have become increasingly popular in the United States. But do consumers really benefit from rewards? In the United States, rewards are paid for primarily by the fees charged to merchants, and merchants may pass on the fees to consumers as higher retail prices....

We estimate the direct effects of rewards card programs on consumer payment choice for in-store transactions. By using a data set that contains information on consumer perceived attributes of payment methods and consumer perceived acceptance of payment methods by merchants, we control for...

By using a unique data set that contains detailed information about consumer payment choice and consumers' attitudes toward each payment method, we estimate the effects of payment card rewards on consumer choice of payment methods. Our approach allows us to control for consumer heterogeneity. We...

This paper presents models that explain why merchants accept payment cards even when the fees they face exceed the transactional benefits they receive from a card transaction. The prevalent assumption - merchants accept cards only when they earn positive net transactional benefits - holds only...

Consumers pay for hundreds of goods and services each year, but across households and across goods, consumers do not choose to pay the same way. This paper posits that payment choices depend in part on consumers' propensity to adopt new technologies and in part on the nature of the transaction....

Prepaid cards are the most rapidly growing payment instrument. General purpose reloadable (GPR) prepaid cards, in particular, have gained considerable traction especially among the unbanked and underbanked. How these cards are used is now of acute interest to both policymakers, seeking to ensure...

We have explained elsewhere the characteristics of public pensions in various countries. In so doing, it became clear that the public pension system in the United States guarantees a minimum income and redistributes income; the public pension system in Germany is like social insurance, in that it...