Abstract This paper surveys the economics literature on payment cards, focusing on the role of interchange fees, merchant internalization, surcharging and two-sided markets. The paper aims to integrate a wide range of theoretical papers with the relevant empirical research and important policy...

Abstract Mobile money schemes have grown rapidly in some developing countries but failed in many more. This paper reports the results of an empirical study of mobile money schemes in 22 developing countries chosen based on prior evidence to include roughly equal numbers of successes and...

Abstract Analysts of air travel markets, which include antitrust authorities, are interested in understanding the extent to which the presence of intermediate stop(s) products influences the pricing of nonstop products. This paper uses a structural econometric model to investigate the potential...

We consider a monopoly that sets a price and differentiated referral fees to spread product information along a simple consumer communication network (a chain). The profit-maximizing solution involves standard monopoly pricing and referral fees that provide consumers with strictly positive...

We study service fee and network size competition in an ATM market between an incumbent and an independent deployer, and its optimal regulation. We also analyze an actual regulation of such a market by competition authorities in Finland. Compared with the first-best regulation, we find...

The aim of this paper is to provide deeper insights into the impact of regulatory reforms and privatization on the R&D spending of electricity utilities. Building on a novel panel data set including the biggest European utilities from eight EU countries over a period from 1985 to 2010, we find...

Broadband has become ubiquitous across OECD countries, yet because it is typically sold as part of a bundle of services, each with its own set of options, little research has explored how it is priced. In this paper we assemble a new dataset of more than 25,000 residential and business broadband...

We study a model of observational learning in a set of agents who are connected through a social network. The agents face identical decision problems under uncertainty and update their choices myopically, imitating the choice of their most successful neighbor. We show that in finite networks,...

It has been shown recently that both card networks’ profits and consumer welfare are higher when the networks charge proportional fees than when they charge fixed per-transaction fees. In this paper, we reexamine this result in a market characterized by free entry. We find that private...

Existing models of two-sided markets explain why platforms charge different prices between buyers and sellers. Generally, the platform will subsidize participation on a side of the market the higher is that side’s positive cross-side externality to users on the other side of the market....