An Agent-Based Model of Interactions in the Payment Card Market

We develop an agent-based model of the competition between payment cards by focusing on the interactions between consumers and merchants determining the subscription and usage of cards. We find that after a short period of time the market will be dominated by a small number of cards, even though there do not exist significant differences between cards and the market is fully competitive. In contrast to the existing literature we focus on the dynamics of market shares and emergence of multi-homing rather than equilibrium outcomes