In a typical bank credit card transaction, the merchant's bank pays an interchange fee, collectively determined by all participating banks, to the cardholder's bank. This paper shows how the interchange fee balances charges between cardholders and merchants under imperfect competition. The...

In an environment with correlated returns, this paper characterizes optimal lending contracts when the bank faces adverse selection and borrowers have limited liability. Group lending contracts are shown to be dominated by revelation mechanisms which do not use the ex post observability of the...

We focus on adverse selection as a foundation of group lending. In a simple static model we show that there is no collateral effect if borrowers do not know each other. If the borrowers know each other, group lending implements efficient lending. However, it is not robust to collusive behavior,...