In this paper, we analyze the problem of congestion and quality loss of data transmission through the Internet from an economic perspective. We show that due to the congestion problem, quality sensitive services are likely to be crowded out by high volume but less quality sensitive applications...

Central banks analyse issues concerning retail payments - or just payments - to be able to promote optimal means of payment. Over the years, electronic payments - i.e. payments initiated and settled electronically - have gradually replaced manual paper-based payments on the grounds of...

Recent advances in telecommunications, particularly using fibre technologies, permit many services based on data-processing to be performed anywhere in the world. They thus become tradable and subject to the laws of comparative advantage. A good example is data-processing within large...